orthonormal comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Wei_Dai 18 April 2012 10:01PM

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Comment author: prase 18 April 2012 11:03:58PM 63 points [-]

I have significantly decreased my participation on LW discussions recently, partly for reasons unrelated to whatever is going on here, but I have few issues with the present state of this site and perhaps they are relevant:

  • LW seems to be slowly becoming self-obsessed. "How do we get better contrarians?" "What should be our debate policies?" "Should discussing politics be banned on LW?" "Is LW a phyg?" "Shouldn't LW become more of a phyg?" Damn. I am not interested in endless meta-debates about community building. Meta debates could be fine, but only if they are rare - else I feel I am losing purposes. Object-level topics should form an overwhelming majority both in the main section and in the discussion.
  • Too narrow set of topics. Somewhat ironically the explicitly forbidden politics is debated quite frequently, but many potentially interesting areas of inquiry are left out completely. You post a question about calculus in the discussion section and get downvoted, since it is "off topic" - ask on MathOverflow. A question about biology? Downvoted, if it is not an ev-psych speculation. Physics? Downvoted, even if it is of the most popular QM-interpretational sort. A puzzle? Downvoted. But there is only so much one can say about AI and ethics and Bayesian epistemology and self-improvement on a level accessible to general internet audience. When I discovered Overcoming Bias (whose half later evolved into LW), it was overflowing with revolutionary and inspiring (from my point of view) ideas. Now I feel saturated as majority of new articles seem to be devoid of new insights (again from my point of view).

If you are afraid that LW could devolve into a dogmatic narrow community without enough contrarians to maintain high level of epistemic hygiene, don't try to spawn new contrarians by methods of social engineering. Instead try to encourage debates on diverse set of topics, mainly those which haven't been addressed by 246 LW articles already. If there is no consensus, people will disagree naturally.

Comment author: thomblake 19 April 2012 12:42:00AM 7 points [-]

LW seems to be slowly becoming self-obsessed.

I don't see how you could possibly be observing that trend. The earliest active comment threads on Less Wrong were voting / karma debates. Going meta is not only what we love best, it's what we're best at, and that's always been so.

You post a question about calculus in the discussion section and get downvoted, since it is "off topic" - ask on MathOverflow. A question about biology? Downvoted, if it is not an ev-psych speculation. Physics? Downvoted, even if it is of the most popular QM-interpretational sort. A puzzle? Downvoted.

Whut?

Links or it didn't happen.

Comment author: orthonormal 19 April 2012 02:45:03AM 5 points [-]

Links or it didn't happen.

I thought of this Mitchell Porter post on MWI and this puzzle post by Thomas. As it happens, I downvoted both (though after a while, I dropped the downvote from the latter) and would defend those downvotes, but I can see how prase gets the impression that we only upvote articles on a narrow subset of topics.

Comment author: thomblake 19 April 2012 02:08:39PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, both of those are low-quality.

Comment author: prase 19 April 2012 05:51:16PM 3 points [-]

As for physics, I was thinking more about this whose negative karma I have already commented on. In the meantime I have forgotten that the post managed to return to zero afterwards.

"Low-quality" is too general a justification to recognise the detailed reasons of downvotes. Among the more concrete criticisms I recall many "this is off-topic, hence my voting down" reactions. My memories may be subject to bias, of course, and I don't want to spend time making a more reliable statistics. What I am feeling more certain about is, however, that there are many people who wish to keep all debates relevant to rationality, which effectively denotes an accidental set of topics, roughly {AI, charity donations, meta-ethics, evolution psychology, self-improvement, cognitive biases, Bayesian probability}. No doubt those topics are interesting, even for me. But not so much to keep me engaged after three (or how much exactly) years of LW's existence. And since I disagree with many standard LW memes, I suppose there may be other potential "contrarians" (perhaps more willing to voice their disagreements than I am) becoming slowly disinterested for reasons similar to mine.

Comment author: wedrifid 19 April 2012 02:57:19AM 1 point [-]

I thought of this Mitchell Porter post on MWI and this puzzle post by Thomas. As it happens, I downvoted both (though after a while, I dropped the downvote from the latter) and would defend those downvotes, but I can see how prase gets the impression that we only upvote articles on a narrow subset of topics.

Wow. The first one is only at -2? That's troubling. Ahh, nevermind.

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