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Grognor comments on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough - Less Wrong
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I think of them (and certain others) as exceptions that prove the rule. If you take away the foundation of the sequences and the small number of awesome people (most of whom, mind you, came here because of Eliezer's sequences), you end up with a place that's indistinguishable from the programmer/atheist/transhumanist/etc. crowd, which is bad if LW is supposed to be making more than nominal progress over time.
Standard disclaimer edit because I have to: The exceptions don't prove the rule in the sense of providing evidence for the rule (indeed, they are technically evidence contrariwise), but they do allow you to notice it. This is what the phrase really means.
Your edit updated me in favour of me being confused about this exception-rule business. Can you link me to something?
-Wikipedia (!!!)
(I should just avoid this phrase from now on, if it's going to cause communication problems.)
I suspect the main cause of misunderstanding (and subsequent misuse) is omission of the relative pronoun "that". The phrase should always be "[that is] the exception that proves the rule", never "the exception proves the rule".
Probably even better to just include "in cases not so excepted" at the end.
Considering how it was subculturally seeded, this should not be surprising. Remember that LW has proceeded in a more or less direct subcultural progression from the Extropians list of the late '90s, with many of the same actual participants.
It's an online community. As such, it's a subculture and it's going to work like one. So you'll see the behaviour of an internet forum, with a bit of the topical stuff on top.
How would you cut down the transhumanist subcultural assumptions in the LW readership?
(If I ever describe LW to people these days it's something like "transhumanists talking philosophy." I believe this is an accurate description.)
Transhumanism isn't the problem. The problem is that when people don't read the sequences, we are no better than any other forum of that community. Too many people are not reading the sequences, and not enough people are calling them out on it.
Exceptions don't prove rules.
You are mostly right, which is exactly what I was getting at with the "promoted is the only good stuff" comment.
I do think there is a lot of interesting, useful stuff outside of promoted, tho, it's just mixed with the usual programmer/atheist/transhumanist/etc-level stuff.
I'd always thought they prove the rule in the sense of testing it.