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daenerys comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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Speaking for myself, I know of at least four people who know of Less Wrong/SI but are not enthusiasts, possibly due to atmosphere issues.
An acquaintance of mine attends Less Wrong meetups and describes most of his friends as being Less Wrongers, but doesn't read Less Wrong and privately holds reservations about the entire singularity thing, saying that we can't hope to say much about the future more than 10 years in advance. He told me that one of his coworkers is also skeptical of the singularity.
A math student/coder I met at an entrepreneurship event told me Less Wrong had good ideas but was "too pretentious".
I was interviewing for an internship once, and the interviewer and I realized we had a mutual acquaintance who was a Less Wronger and SI donor. He asked me if I was part of that entire group, and I said yes. His attitude was a bit derisive.
I would consider myself a pretty far outlier on LessWrong (as a female, ENFP (people-person, impulsive/intuitive), Hufflepuff type). So on one hand, my opinion may mean less, because I am not generally the "type" of person associated with LW. On the other hand, if you want to expand LW to more people, then I think some changes need to be made for other "types" of people to also feel comfortable here.
Along with the initial "cult" impression (which eventually dissipates, IMO), what threw me most is the harshness of the forums. I've been on here for about 4 months now, and it's still difficult for me to deal with. Also, I agree that topics like FAI, and Singularitarianism aren't necessarily the best things to be discussing when trying to get people interested in rationality.
I am well-aware that the things that would make LW more comfortable for me and others like me, would make it less comfortable for many of the current posters. So there is definitely a conflict of goals.
Goal A- Grow LW and make rationality more popular- Need to make LW more "nice" and perhaps focused on Instrumental Rationality rather than Singularity and FAI issues.
Goal B- Maintain current culture and level of posts.- Need to NOT significantly change LW, and perhaps focus more on the obscure posts that are extremely difficult for newer people to understand.
AFAICT pursuit of either of these goals will be at the detriment of the other goal.
Could you be more specific about what comes off as harsh to you?
If you'd rather address this as a private message, I'm still interested.
What comes across as harsh to me: down voting discussion posts because they're accidental duplicates/don't fit some idea of what a discussion post is supposed to be, a lot of down voting that goes on in general, unbridled or curt disagreement (like grognor's response to my post. You saw him cursing and yelling, right? I made this post because I thought the less wrong community could use optimization on the topics I wrote about, not because I wanted to antagonize anyone.)
PM'd response. General agreement with John below (which I didn't see until just now).