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Unnamed comments on Elitism isn't necessary for refining rationality. - Less Wrong
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Okay. That's a good point. Though I'd like to ask you to take a moment to understand where I'm coming from:
I find LessWrong, and go "A clearing of sanity in this jungle of irrationality? Great!" I see that the clearing of sanity wants to improve it's website in John's proposed rewrites thread. (I thought he had been chosen to do this task but evidently, he just up and started a thread.)
As a web professional who knows things about web marketing, I could see that if LW wants to grow, they're doing it wrong. I say so in John's thread. This doesn't get anywhere, so I make a chart, and I post about it.
This becomes one of the top 30 discussions of all time. I volunteer to help LessWrong grow, and I'm given access to the LessWrong Google Analytics account.
A bunch of people commented with concerns about how growth could destroy the culture in the discussions, including a link to the wiki on the Eternal September phenomenon.
I discovered a comment that I found upsetting about "keeping out the intellectual riff-raff" and told Luke about it. I mention in an email that "my ethics do not allow me to do work for an organization that allows elitism." I assumed he did not want LessWrong to have a reputation for "elitism" (regardless of how it's defined internally, the external world will most likely think it looks bad) so I figured he'd do something about it.
Now I'm in a pickle. I do not want to destroy the nice clearing of sanity by deluging it in newbies, but I have volunteered to help it grow. Being a responsible person, I can neither forget the volunteer offer or just risk destroying the culture without even thinking it through. Instead of giving up, I think of solutions to the problem and invite the group to criticize these and share their wisdom with me in my Preventing "endless September" discussion.
Luke says he's not very worried about endless September even though Eliezer is definitely worried about discussion quality and a whole bunch of people posted concerns, but he invites me to discuss it because he might change his mind.
My concerns are complex and they won't fit in a comment, and people had been interested in criticizing my ideas so far, so I make a new thread, a call for agreement. Bad idea if you go by the popularity of that, but I've noted to self that people prefer to have few to no meta threads and hopefully, my original reasons are understandable.
A bunch more people express that they're in favor of "elitism" most notably in a comment with over 20 upvotes: "LessWrong is elitist:" ... "I wish LessWrong was more elitist!". Though it's still not clear what they mean, I find the amount of "elitism" talk to be rather alarming, because calling one's self or group "elitist" makes a very bad impression, even if you guys are all wonderful people. But for all I know, the 20+ people that upvoted that comment interpreted it in the worst possible sense of the word and really did mean to express that they're jerks, and may have not even stopped to consider whether the original commenter didn't mean it that way before pressing the upvote button.
At this point, two new obstacles to me helping LessWrong grow appear: One, helping LessWrong grow in order to be seen as "elitist" by the world will only smear their public reputation. This would hurt the site and make the parent organization look bad. Two, if LessWrong really is "elitist" in the nasty sense of the word, I have to refuse to help them for ethical reasons.
The people here are describing themselves and each other in public as "elitist". But some of them use their real names on the forum. This is the internet where what you say might last forever. Yet here they are smearing themselves and each other, the LessWrong website, and the Singularity Institute (by association), as "elitist".
Nobody seems to think that this is a bad idea but me. The clearing of sanity in a jungle has begun to look too much like the jungle itself to me. At this point, it's either try to explain it to them or revoke my offer to volunteer and leave the site. I figure "These guys care about rationality, right? How hard can it be? I'll explain my view and we'll probably come to a nice sensible agreement of some kind."
That attempt (this thread) didn't go over too well, for reasons that still aren't completely clear to me due to the large number of completely different criticisms. Few have responded to the topic itself, so I don't really know whether people agree or disagree. Some people think they speak for the group, but I have never seen that work out on LessWrong - so far, those I've seen speaking for the group have been verifiably incorrect. So I made a poll. Where I am at right now is that even though some (Schminux, Mitchell_Porter) seem to think I have potential to be a good writer here, I am so terribly put off by the way people are smearing themselves as elitists that if it doesn't get resolved somehow, I'm more likely to throw up than ever write you guys an article.
I either have to try to resolve my concerns about the "elitism" talk, or go do something better with my time than stay here being smeared as an "elitist" with the rest of you.
If anyone can suggest a resolution to this problem, I'm more than willing to hear it.
The word "elitism" is vague and affect-laden. In order to have a productive conversation about the set of topics that the label "elitism" vaguely points towards, it is necessary to set aside that term and get into specifics, rather than letting the conversation revolve around the word "elitism".
Before you started posting on Less Wrong, the word "elitism" (and its variants) rarely appeared on the website. You introduced the word to the conversation (e.g., here), and you have used it again and again (over a hundred times, according to your comment history). That is why some people have expressed their opinions in terms of the word "elitism" (where their opinion, roughly, is that they want Less Wrong to have high quality content). So if you just want people to stop using the word "elitism", you should be able to accomplish that (for the most part) by not using the word "elitism."
You let yourself get sidetracked from your goal of growing Less Wrong and decided to lead a largely irrelevant side conversation centered on the word "elitism" (what it means, whether it applies to Less Wrong, whether people might get the impression that it applies to Less Wrong, etc.). This discussion has been unproductive and lengthy, and you didn't heed the signals to stop taking the conversation in that direction (which included downvotes, comments about how you should proceed differently, and the obvious lack of progress towards your goal).
If you weren't offering to do work to help the site, I'd second Morendil's suggestion that you stick to object-level conversations, at least for a while. Maybe once you've spent some more time here and gotten a better feel for the site and its users you could re-engage in meta-level conversations about improving Less Wrong. That still might be the best option in the actual situation.
Another potential option for moving forward is for you to focus on more concrete questions about improving the site which draw more directly on your web marketing expertise. Is there a standard menu of options that web marketing professionals use to help a site grow? Do some of those options stand a better chance of maintaining the site's quality, or can they be tailored to do so? Are there proven techniques for preventing a drop in quality in the face of growth? If your company does this sort of thing, what kinds of conversations do you have with organizations to try to figure out how to increase their web presence in a way that's consistent with their goals? You're the one who has been leading this effort to improve the site; figure out how to lead it in a more productive direction. (And be aware that many Less Wrongers are losing their patience with you, or have already lost it. So don't waste whatever attention you can get).
I don't think you understand the very bad reaction I had to elitism. I feel that it is very important not to contribute to elitism (by some definitions like this one, which are not the same as the more popular interpretations here from what I can tell, though I didn't know that before) and that it is also very important to avoid being judged as an elitist (by that definition). I feel so strongly about this that I wanted to quit. According to my poll, 20% have the same strong feelings I do.
Based on the fact that you didn't seem to realize I was willing to quit over this and didn't see further interaction as worthwhile unless it was determined that most people here do not support elitism (by the particular definition), I would have to guess that you have a radically different idea of what elitism is from the definition that I was using.
I have realized that I need to learn a lot more about other people's ideas of elitism. This is an important topic to me. Would you be interested in explaining your ideas about elitism?