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gwern comments on Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It - Less Wrong
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I don't think the problem was careless reading. When you open with a comment about attacking chip fabs without specifying that you mean a government level military and your audience is mainly in a country where everyone has been bathed in the fear of terrorism for years, this is bound to trigger mind kill reactions. You could argue "Good LW'ers should stay rational while thinking about terrorism." but aside from the fact that everyone has flaws and that's a pretty common one, more importantly, you seem to overlook the fact that the entire rest of the world can see what you wrote. Humans aren't known for being rational. They're known for doing things like burning "witches" and poisoning Socrates. In this time and place, you're less likely to get us killed by an angry mob, but you could easily provoke the equivalent of that in negative attention. Reddit and The Wall Street Journal have both done articles on Less Wrong recently. Big fish are starting to pay attention to LessWrong. That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views. One of Luke's older posts got 200,000 views. (Google analytics). For contrast, a book is considered a bestseller if it sells 100,000 copies.
YOU could end up getting that much attention on this site, Gwern, and the attention is not just from us. There are only about 13,000 registered users in the user database, and only 500-1000 of them are active in a given month. That just doesn't account for all of the traffic to the posts.
Even if it were true that all the people who misread this are schmoes, choosing to leave the site over it may be a perfectly valid application of one's intelligence. Not associating one's reputation with a group that is mistakenly thought to be in favor of terrorism is a perfectly sane survival move. I wondered if I should quit, myself before deciding to suggest that you edit the post.
Considering the amount of attention that LessWrong is getting, and the fact that you are a very prominent member here whose words will be taken (or mistaken) as an indication of the group's mentality, do you not think it's a good idea to avoid making others look bad?
Mm, maybe. It is difficult for me to see such things; as I pointed out in another comment, before I wrote this, I spent scores of hours reading up on and researching terrorism and indeed posted that to LW as well; to me, terrorism is such an obviously useless approach - for anything but false flag operations - that nothing needs to be said about it.
Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO - one will spend much more time on a book than even a long essay. 1344 page views doesn't impress me. For example, for this October,
gwern.nethad 51x more or 69,311 total page views. The lifetime total for this essay on my site is already at 7,515, and most of that is from before I deleted the version here so I expect that will boost the numbers a bit in the future.Agreed, especially if deciding things like whether to invest in publishing a particular author's new book. However, my purpose was just to make the number seem more real. Humans have problems with that - "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." as they say. I think it was an okay metaphor for that purpose.
I'm not trying to say Luke's article is a "bestseller" (in fact it has a bounce rate of about 90%), just that LW posts can get a lot of exposure so even if it is the standard that LW members should be rational enough not to mindkill on posts like that one, we should probably care about it if non-rationalists from the world at large are mind-killing on stuff written here.