Psychohistorian comments on Dissenting Views - Less Wrong

19 Post author: byrnema 26 May 2009 06:55PM

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Comment author: Psychohistorian 26 May 2009 10:22:47PM 3 points [-]

This is an interesting and worthwhile idea, though TBH I'm not sure I agree with the premise.

The whole "rationality" thing provides more of a framework that a status quo. People who make posts like "Well, I'm a rationalist and a theist, so there! Ha!" do tend to get voted down (when they lack evidence/argument), but I hardly see a problem with this. This community strongly encourages people to provide supporting evidence or argumentation and (interestingly) seems to have no objections to extremely long posts/replies.I have yet to see a well-thought-out, on-topic post get voted down. Admittedly some top-levels (including mine!) never get voted up, but that doesn't seem to be the result of a status quo being unwilling to consider them; it's usually that they aren't totally cogent, they aren't well written, or they're simply too minute to interest people.

I would actually be at least as curious to know what, specifically, has run into this problem to date, as I would be to hear ideas people have wanted to throw out there, but thought would be rejected out of hand.