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Michaelos comments on Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Edited! If that's poor phrasing, I want to fix it. My intended goal was "I need to reference the topic of this article in some manner, so that people will know why to read it." and from your post that wasn't getting across.
However, that is not the first critique I have gotten about phrasing, and in retrospect, I am concerned that I am more of a rationality pretender than an actual rationalist. I mean, I approve of rationality, and I try to follow the math (and can't when it starts getting hard, frequently because it would take too long and I am usually following Less Wrong intermittently while focusing on other things as well), but I have received multiple complaints that I feel like I can fairly sum up as "You're the rationalist equivalent of a annoying cheerleader yelling 'Go Team, Smash the Other Team', that's not what rationality is about, please stop."
I think it is safe to say that I really do have that as a problem (multiple different sources seem to indicate it to me.) And I would prefer to fix it, but I'm not sure how to fix it. If you or anyone else have thoughts on how to change, I am open to suggestion.
That's exactly the impression that I got. That it was awkward phrasing, because you just didn't know how to phrase it - but that it wasn't a coincidence that you defaulted to that particular awkward phrasing. It seems that, on some level, you were surprised to see people outside lesswrong discussing "lesswrong ideas." Even though, intellectually, you know that most of the good ideas on lesswrong didn't originate here. Don't be too hard on yourself. I probably have the opposite problem, where, as a meta-contrarian, I can't do anything but criticize lesswrong.
If you want to avoid sounding like a cheerleader, I think the best rule of thumb is to just not name-drop. It's great if you get a lot of ideas from Eliezer and lesswrong, but then communicate those ideas in a way that makes it difficult to trace them back to lesswrong. This should come naturally, because you shouldn't believe everything you hear on lesswrong anyway. Confirm what you hear with an independent source, and then you can refer to that source instead of lesswrong, just like you would with information you learned on wikipedia.
Thank you for the advice, and I will try to follow that rule of thumb more in the future.