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David_Gerard comments on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough - Less Wrong
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In my case it left the impression that (a) this was an Internet forum like any other I've been on in the past seventeen years (b) like all of them, it behaved as though its problems were unique and special, rather than a completely generic phenomenon. So, pretty much as normal then.
BTW, to read the sequences is not to agree with every word of them, and when I read all the rest of the posts chronologically from 2009-2011 the main thing I got from it was the social lay of the land.
(My sociology is strictly amateur, though an ongoing personal interest.)
This is hardly my first rodeo, but this place is unlike any others I've been on for exactly the point at issues here - the existence of a huge corpus written overwhelmingly by one list member that people are expected to read before posting and relate their posts to. The closest I've come to such attitudes were on two lists; one Objectivist, one Anarchist.
On the Objectivist list, where there was a little bit of "that was all answered in this book/lecture from Rand", people were not at all expected to have read the entire corpus before participating. Rand herself was not participating on the list, so there is another difference.
The Anarchist list was basically the list of an internet personality who was making a commercial venture of it, so he controlled the terms of the debate as suited his purposes, and tabooed issues he considered settled. Once that was clear to me, I left the site, considering it too phygish.
I'd imagine that there are numerous religious sites with the same kind of reading/relating requirements, but only a limited number of those where the author of the corpus was a member of the list.
To LW's credit, "read the sequences" as a counterargument seems increasingly rare these days. I've seen it once in the last week or two, but considering that we're now dealing with an unusually large number of what I'll politely describe as contrarian newcomers, I'll still count that as a win.
In any case, I don't get the sense that this is an unknown issue. Calls for good introductory material come up fairly often, so clearly someone out there wants a better alternative to pointing newcomers at a half-million words of highly variable material and hoping for the best -- but even if successful, I suspect that'll be of limited value. The length of the corpus might contribute to accusations of phygism, but it's not what worries me about LW. Neither is the norm of relating posts to the Sequences.
This does give me pause, though: LW deals politely with intelligent criticism, but it rarely internalizes it. To the best of my recollection none of the major points of the Sequences have been repudiated, although in a work of that length we should expect some to have turned out to be demonstrably wrong; no one bats a thousand. A few seem to have slipped out of the de-facto canon -- the metaethics sequence comes to mind, as does most of Fun Theory -- but that doesn't seem to be so much a response to criticism as to simple lack of interest or lesser development of ideas. It's not a closed system, not quite, but its visa regulations seem strict, and naturalization difficult.
What can we do about this?
I think that you've got a bigger problem than internalizing repudiations. The demand for repudiations is the mistake Critical Rationalists make - "show me where I'm wrong" is not a sufficiently open mind.
First, the problem might be that you're not even wrong. You can't refute something that's not even wrong. When someone is not even wrong, he has to be willing to justify his ideas, or you can't make progress. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.
(As an aside, is there an article about Not Even Wrong here? I don't remember one, and it is an important idea to which a lot are probably already familiar. Goes well with the list name, too.)
Second, if one is only open to repudiations, one is not open to fundamentally different conceptualizations on the issue. The mapping from one conceptualization to another can be a tedious and unproductive exercise, if even possible in practical terms.
I've spent years on a mailing list about Stirner - likely The mailing list on Stirner. In my opinion, Stirner has the best take on metaethics, and even if you don't agree, there are a number of issues he brings up better than others. A lot of smart folks on that list, and we made some limited original progress.
Stirner is near the top of the list for things I know better than others. People who would know better, are likely people I already know in a limited fashion. I thought to write an article from that perspective, contrasting that with points in the Metaethics sequence. But I don't think the argument in the Metaethics sequence really follows, and contemplating an exegesis of it to "repudiate" it fills me with a vast ennui. So, it's Bah Humbug, and I don't contribute.
Whatever you might think of me, setting up impediments to people sharing what they know best is probably not in the interest of the list. There's enough natural impediment to posting an article in a group; always easier to snipe at others than put your own ideas up for target practice. There's risk in that. And given the prevalence of akrasia here, do we need additional impediments?
One thing that I think would be helpful to all concerned is a weighted rating of the sequence articles, weighted by some function of karma, perhaps. If some sequences have fallen out of canon, or never were in canon, it would be nice to know. Just how much support any particular article has would be useful information.
Not that I know of, although it's referenced all over the place -- like Paul Graham's paper on identity, it seems to be an external part of the LW canon. The Wikipedia page on "Not Even Wrong" does appear in XiXiDu's list of external resources -- a post that's faded into undeserved obscurity, I think.
As to your broader point, I agree that "show me where I'm wrong" is suboptimal with regard to establishing a genuinely open system of ideas. It's also a good first step, though, and so I'd view a failure to internalize repudiation as a red flag of the same species as what you seem to be pointing to -- a bigger one, in fact. Not sufficient, but necessary.
Certainly if you have been repudiated, but fail to internalize the repudiation, you've got a big red flag. But that's why I think's it less dangerous and debilitating - it's clear, obvious, and visible.
I consider only listening to repudiations as the bigger problem: it is being willfully deaf and non responsive to potential improvement. It's not failing to understand, it's refusing to listen.
In that case, Lukeprog's metaethics sequence must have been of great comfort to you, since he didn't really spend much time on Eliezer's metaethics sequence. Perhaps you could just start covering Stimer's material in a discussion post or two and see what happens.
Reply not with "read the sequences", but with "This is covered in [link to post], which is part of [link to sequence]." ? Use one of the n00b-infested Harry Potter threads, with plenty of wrong but not hopeless reasoning, as target practice.
Just curious, was the anarchist Fgrsna Zbylarhk?
DIng! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
Yeah, that's the one. I don't begrudge a guy trying to make a buck, or wanting to push his agenda. I find him a bright guy with a lot of interesting things to say. And I'll still listen to his youtube videos. But his agenda conflicts with mine, and I don't want to spend energy discussing issues in a community where one isn't allowed to publicly argue against some dogma in philosophy. That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
Oooh, what's my prize?
Yup, I pretty much agree with your assessment. It was quite the interesting rabbit hole to go down. But at least for me, it became anti-productive and unhealthy. I found much better uses of my time.
That's an important difference, but I don't think it's one for the social issues being raised in this post or this thread, which are issues of community interaction - and I think so because it's the same issues covered in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. This post is precisely the call for a wizard smackdown.
I'm sure. What I wonder is how much the sequences even represent a consensus of the original list members involved in the discussion. In my estimation, it varies a lot. In particular, I doubt EY carried the day with even a strong plurality with both his conclusions and argument in the metaethics sequence.
I doubt even Eliezer_2012 would agree with all of them. They were a rather rapidly produced bunch of blog posts and very few people would maintain consistent endorsement of past blogging output.
I was going to say essentially this, but the other David did it for me.