OnTheOtherHandle replied to this (below). Unfortunately, she is still not sure how the site's various buttons work, so it got sent to me as a PM. I'm pretty sure she wanted it shared, so I am doing so. If you want to upvote her ideas, I suppose you will have to upvote the grandparent. Here is what she wrote:

Hi, um, I got your message from the envelope-shaped button on the sidebar. I don't even know if it was private or on the comments, but I can't seem to access that page to write a reply there, so I'll just send you this. Sorry if this isn't the right way to do things, it takes me a while to navigate a new site.

As for ideas, well, those are difficult, so I'll start with what attracted me to LW. As I said, it was Methods of Rationality that brought me here, and what I liked about that was it was very scientific and logical without being The Spock - without shunning emotions as wrong or illogical, something I never really got. It made me laugh out loud many times and even cry once or twice.

Because of this, it worked as a story first and foremost. If a piece of fiction is overtly trying to promote a philosophy, then it earns HUGE bonus points for actually being a good story in its own right. I'd say it served as a nice, fun way to "ease into" the rationalist community. Plus, it really made me feel for the transhumanist cause, and made me think hard about the idea that death was inevitable or acceptable, even though I can't say with certainty yet that I'm a transhumanist.

As for what made me stay, well, this is fascinating stuff. I love science and psychology. I was already an atheist and a huge nerd and had already read some Dawkins and Feynman before seeing this site, so I guess that helped me to not become so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material here. I think a little background is important, because even though LW is pretty accessable, I can't say it's for beginners. (But of course, since I've been randomly article-hopping, it's likely that I missed the material intended for newcomers.)

Another reason I want to stay is because LW hasn't been purged of the emotionality of Methods of Rationality. I see here a community of people that cares deeply about their cause, and that helps a lot.

But this might be a deterrent for a lot of people actually. The debates get heated here, and you can feel tempers running high. I got the feeling, initially, that I would read an article, and then in the comments read a huge list of reasons why it was totally wrong, almost as long as the original piece itself. I don't mind too much, but I think I have a higher tolerance for argument than most people (most teenagers and most female teenagers especially). I can see how someone could look at this and think "YouTube flame wars but wordier", conclude you're "immature", and leave. Unfortunately, I can't really think of a solution, except maybe hiding the comments unless someone clicks a specific button to read them.

Hope this helped. :)

I, too, got that feeling when I first browsed here. My solution to it was to look at the karma of comments: if a [comment] got up above 5 karma, it probably is a reason why the post is wrong. If the [comment] was at neutral or negative karma, it probably isn't a reason why the post is wrong. I don't have much data on how effective this method is, but it seemed to work for me. That's not a general solution, though.

Are those comment/post substitutions what you intended to say? I was initially confused but that correction made sense of it. That policy seems to be a reasonable one. I use approximately the same interpretation except on topics that get political. "Correctness" becomes much less correlated to karma in such cases.

I see many arguments ending with one person admitting/realising they were mistaken (this is something that I had never seen anywhere else on the internet), but I see more disagreements left hanging.

Resolving disagreements on the internet is impressive, isn't it? People just stopped being wrong on the internet! WTF? At the same time there is a place for leaving things hanging. Sometimes leaving aside disagreements without making a fuss or engaging in status battles can be good enough. Particularly in those (frequent) cases where the issue isn't cut and dry. When there is merit in both points but this can't be simply acknowledged without reconstructing and translating from not-quite-compatible models of reality.

I bother to mention this because I've noticed that sometimes trying to resolve differences can at times do more harm than good, despite the best of intentions. Some people actually get offended if you try to be conciliatory, bizarre as it may seem.

You might be interested in reading The Case Against Adolescence by Dr. Robert Epstein. (I believe the last edition is called Teen 2.0)

It is eye-opening on many aspects. There is a story in it that struck me. A twelve year old had an affair with his married teacher (who had two kids on her own). She went to prison for two-three years. Once out of the slammer, she had sex again with her ex-pupil. This time around 7-8 years of prison. While in prison she gave birth to a child. The child was raised by the father (the student) and that father's mother. Reporters asked the young man if the imprisoned woman had abused of him; he answered negatively, that love united them. Once the ex-teacher got out of prison for the second time she married the then adult lover, went into their car with their kid and rolled into the sunset.

How immature. Both of them. Love at teenage? Meh. Love is only for old people like Romeo (~16) and Juliet. (~14) Those crazy homo sapiens.

Definition from Urban Dictionary: "A grown-up in the minority, finding themselves among younger people. Coined by Adrian Spies, writer of the Star Trek episode featuring a post-apocalyptic world where only teenagers survived."

Which fits because I am on the far upper end of the age distribution here (which Eliezer knows because I attend meetups in the Bay Area).