Who's this we? You're imbuing the community with a hivemind it doesn't possess.
It's also wrong; look, for example, at when Eliezer's OKCupid profile came up in a newspaper http://lesswrong.com/lw/ds4/article_about_lw_faith_hope_and_singularity/73gd
I'm hoping the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek...? (If so, it's merely the product of poor judgment, rather than terrifying.)
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It's not so much the content as the presentation. The tone is incredibly self-absorbed and condescending. I thought the whole thing was a joke until I encountered the above quoted paragraph with its apparent sincerity. Presumably some of the content is intended to be tongue-in-check and some of it posturing, but it's difficult to separate. There's a compounding weirdness to the whole thing. Fetishes or open relationships or whatever aren't in themselves causes for concern but when somebody is trying to advocate for rationalism and a particular approach to ethics, the sense that you're following them somewhere very strange isn't good to have.
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Less Wrong is already weird enough without the blatant weirdness in EY's OKCupid profile. I'm seriously disappointed and worried by the fact that it's still public, to be honest...
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Of course, there's also supportive comments similarly upvoted, but those comments prove that at least a few LWers agreed 'yeah, that's pretty blatantly weird'.
I kinda-agree with the following from that thread:
a: >99% of the time that you see that sort of profile, you really should keep the hell away from that person unless you are masochistic enough or other special conditions apply.
and b: you should sincerely thank Eliezer for writing the profile in such honest manner!
Both appear to be likely, but not in the sense that private_messaging/Dmitry seems to imply ("Eliezer really is messed up"). As social pressure against men openly stating that they're sexually sadistic is horrifying, worse than fo...
The rationalist in question, of course, is our very own EY.
Quotes giving a reasonable sample of the spectrum of reactions:
Why is this important to consider?
LessWrong as a community is dedicated to trying to "raise the sanity waterline," and its most respected members in particular put a lot of resources into outreach, via CFAR, HPMoR, and maintaining this site. But a big factor in how people perceive our brand of rationality is about image. If we're serious about raising the sanity waterline, that means image management - or at least avoiding active image malpractice - is something we should enthusiastically embrace as a way to achieve our goals. [1]
This is also a valuable exercise in considering the outside view. Marginal Revolution is already a fairly WEIRD site, focused on abstract economic issues. If any major blog is likely to be sympathetic to our cultural quirks, this would be it. Yet a plurality of commenters reacted negatively.
To the extent that we didn't notice anything strange about LW's figurehead having this OKCupid profile, LW either failed at calibrating mainstream reaction, or failed at consequentialism and realizing the drag this would have on our other recruitment efforts. In our last discussion, there were only a few commenters raising concerns, and the consensus of the thread was that it was harmless and had no PR consequences worth noting.
As one commenter cogently put it,
I'd argue the same reasoning applies to the community at large, not just EY specifically.
[1] From Anna's excellent article: 5. I consciously attempt to welcome bad news, or at least not push it away. (Recent example from Eliezer: At a brainstorming session for future Singularity Summits, one issue raised was that we hadn't really been asking for money at previous ones. My brain was offering resistance, so I applied the "bad news is good news" pattern to rephrase this as, "This point doesn't change the fixed amount of money we raised in past years, so it is good news because it implies that we can fix the strategy and do better next year.")