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Eugine_Nier comments on Evidence for the orthogonality thesis - Less Wrong
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It's perhaps worth noting that this observation is true of most discussion about most even-mildly-controversial subjects on LessWrong—quantum mechanics, cryonics, heuristics and biases, ethics, meta-ethics, theology, epistemology, group selection, hard takeoff, Friendliness, et cetera. What confuses me is that LessWrong continues to attract really impressive people anyway; it seems to be the internet's biggest/best forum for interesting technical discussion about epistemology, Schellingian game theory, the singularity, &c., even though most of the discussion is just annoying echoes. One of a hundred or so regular commenters is actually trying or is a real intellectual, not a fountain of cultish sloganeering and cheering. Others are weird hybrids of cheerleader and actually trying / real intellectual (like me, though I try to cheer on a higher level, and about more important things). Unfortunately I don't know of any way to raise the "sanity waterline", if such a concept makes sense, and I suspect that the new Center for Modern Rationality is going to make things worse, not better. I hope I'm wrong. ...I feel like there's something that could be done, but I have no idea what it is.
Eh, I think Vassar's reply is more to the point.
Why is that confusing? Have you looked at the rest of the internet recently?
Not really. But are you saying that nowhere else on the internet is close to LessWrong's standards of discourse? I'd figured that but part of me keeps saying "there's no way that can be true" for some reason.
I'm not sure why I'm confused, but I think there's a place where my model (of how many cool people there are and how willing they would be to participate on a site like LessWrong) is off by an order of magnitude or so.
A better question is how many of them are willing to create a site like LessWrong.
Also minor nitpick about your use of the word 'cool', since it normally denotes social status rather than rationality.
It might be true when it comes to cross-domain rationality (with a few outliers like social abilities). But it certainly isn't true that Less Wrong is anywhere close to the edge in most fields (with a few outliers like decision theory).