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OrphanWilde comments on Poll - Is endless September a threat to LW and what should be done? - Less Wrong
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Comments (259)
This post reminds me of Eliezer's own complaints against Objectivism; that Ayn Rand's ingroup became increasingly selective as time went on, developing a self-reinforcing fundamentalism.
As I wrote in one of my blogs a while back, discussing another community that rejects newcomers:
"This is a part of every community. A community which cannot or will not do this is crippled and doomed, which is to say, it -is- their jobs to [teach new members their mores]. This is part of humanity; we keep dying and getting replaced, and training our replacements is a constant job. We cannot expect that people should "Just know" the right way to behave, we have to teach them that, whether they're twelve, twenty two, or eighty two"
An elite intellectual community can^H^H^H has to mostly reject newcomers, but those it does accept it has to invest in very effectively (while avoiding the Objectivist failure mode).
I think part of the problem is that LW has elements of both a ground for elite intellectual discussion and a ground for a movement, and these goals seem hard or impossible to serve with the same forum.
I agree that laziness and expecting people to "just know" is also part of the problem. Upvoted for the quote.
I'm not entirely sure that expecting people to "just know" is a huge problem here, as on the Internet appropriate behavior can be inferred relatively easily by reading past posts and comments-- hence the common instruction to "lurk more."
One could construe this as a filter, but if so, who is it excluding? People with low situational awareness?
The obvious analogy of childood here would be lurking, which does not require any special effort to "teach them that, whether they're twelve, twenty two, or eighty two"