Viliam_Bur comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong

29 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 15 March 2012 12:41AM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 16 March 2012 09:07:04AM 15 points [-]

What's bad about cults is not that they're weird. It's that they motivate people to do bad things...

People use "weird" as a heuristic for danger, and personally I don't blame them, because they have good Bayesian reasons for it. Breaking a social norm X is positively correlated with breaking a social norm Y, and the correlation is strong enough for most people to notice.

The right thing to do is to show enough social skill to avoid triggering the weirdness alarm signal. (Just like publishing in serious media is the right thing to avoid the "pseudoscience" label.) You cannot expect that outsiders will do an exception for LW, suspend their heuristics and explore the website deeply; that would be asking them to privilege a hypothesis.

If something is "weird", we should try to make it less weird. No excuses.

Comment author: ryjm 21 March 2012 01:42:26PM 0 points [-]

So we should be Less Weird now? ;)

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 21 March 2012 03:22:02PM *  2 points [-]

We should be winning.

Less Weird is a good heuristic for winning (though a bad heuristic for a site name ).