I have several questions related to this:
- Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?
- If so, can you suggest any easy steps we could take?
- Is it possible that there are aspects of the atmosphere here that are driving away intelligent, rationally inclined people who might otherwise be interested in Less Wrong?
- Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?
- Is it possible that our culture might be different if these folks were hanging around and contributing? Presumably they are disproportionately represented among certain personality types.
If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:
Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.
Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:
Some people consider the Sequences the most important work they have ever read.
Generally, if your comment or post is on-topic, thoughtful, and shows that you're familiar with the Sequences, your comment or post will be upvoted.
Many of us believe in the importance of developing qualities described in Twelve Virtues of Rationality: [insert mystical sounding description of how to be rational here]
And on the sequences page:
If you don't read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, little else on Less Wrong will make much sense.
This seems obviously false to me.
These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.
We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.
In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.
Do you believe most people are already quite altruistic in that sense? Why? It seems to me that many people give lip service to altruism, but their actions (e.g. reluctance to donate to highly efficient charities) speak otherwise. I think rationality education should help people achieve the goals they're already trying to achieve, not the goals that the teacher wants them to achieve.
False dichotomy. Humans are not automatically strategic, we often act on urges, not goals, and even our explicitly conceptualized goals can be divorced from reality, perhaps more so than the urges. There are general purpose skills that have an impact on behavior (and explicit goals) by correcting errors in reasoning, not specifically aimed at aligning students' explicit goals with those of their teac... (read more)