A whole lot of Less Wrong seems to be going for less detail, less knowledge, more use of frameworks of universal applicability and little precision. The sequences seem similar to me: Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can't. And always too long. I've read about four paragraphs of them in total. The quality of conversation here is high for a blog, of course, but low for a good academic setting. Some of the mild sneering at academics around here sounds ridiculous (an AI researcher believes in God). AI's a weak field. All round, papers don't quite capture any field and are often way way behind what people roughly feel.
This. A thousand times this. As a lawyer, LessWrong pattern matches with people outside a complicated field who are convinced that those in the fields are idiots because observers think that "the field is not that complicated."
That said, "Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can't." is an unfair criticism. Lots of really excellent ideas seem boring if you had already internalized the core ideas.
Reminds me of part of a comment on Moldbug's blot, by Nick Szabo:
...[legal reasoning]
It's a disciplined and competitive (dialectic, in the true original sense of that term) use of analogies, precedents, and emergent rules, far more sophisticated than normal use of analogy and metaphor. I learned it my first year of law school and it's a radically different kind of thinking I had never encountered before in school. The Bayesian bloggers seem to be completely oblivious to it, and to the tremendous value of tradition generally. That makes them, from my POV, cu
I'm worried that LW doesn't have enough good contrarians and skeptics, people who disagree with us or like to find fault in every idea they see, but do so in a way that is often right and can change our minds when they are. I fear that when contrarians/skeptics join us but aren't "good enough", we tend to drive them away instead of improving them.
For example, I know a couple of people who occasionally had interesting ideas that were contrary to the local LW consensus, but were (or appeared to be) too confident in their ideas, both good and bad. Both people ended up being repeatedly downvoted and left our community a few months after they arrived. This must have happened more often than I have noticed (partly evidenced by the large number of comments/posts now marked as written by [deleted], sometimes with whole threads written entirely by deleted accounts). I feel that this is a waste that we should try to prevent (or at least think about how we might). So here are some ideas: