shminux comments on [Link] Nerds are nuts - Less Wrong

25 [deleted] 07 June 2012 07:48AM

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Comment author: shminux 07 June 2012 04:23:01PM 6 points [-]

Too long, lacking a decent summary upfront, misleading, if catchy, title. Presumably the point is that technical people overestimate the reliability of wetware.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 June 2012 07:27:01AM *  5 points [-]

These are relevant criticisms. Trying to address them I have changed the intro to this:

Related to: Reason as memetic immune disorder, Commentary on compartmentalization

On the old old gnxp site site Razib Khan wrote an interesting piece on a failure mode of nerds. This is I think something very important to keep in mind because for better or worse LessWrong is nerdspace. It deals with how the systematizing tendencies coupled with a lack of common sense can lead to troublesome failure modes and identifies some religious fundamentalism as symptomatic of such minds. At the end of both the original article as well as in the text I quote here is a quick list summary of the contents, if you aren't sure about the VOI consider reading that point by point summary first to help you judge it. The introduction provides interesting information very useful in context but isn't absolutely necessary.

Link to original article.

I have also broken it up with subtitles into three parts, making the end article summary easy to spot and added two important related links to a prominent spot.

Is this an improvement?

Comment author: shminux 08 June 2012 03:05:23PM 0 points [-]

Is this an improvement?

Well, yeah, but I still cannot tell if my one-line summary is correct or not.