gwern comments on Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: diegocaleiro 15 April 2013 07:57PM

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Comment author: gwern 27 April 2013 09:18:27PM *  0 points [-]

The money or lack thereof doesn't matter, since RW is obviously not an implementation of Villam's proposed strategy: it fails on the ugliness with its stock MediaWiki appearance, has too broad a remit, and like El Reg it shoots itself in the foot with its oh-so-hilarious-not! sense of humor (I dislike reading it even on pages completely unrelated to LW). It may be successful in its niche, but its niche is essentially the same niche as /r/atheism or Richard Dawkins - mockery of the enemy leavened with some facts and references.

If - purely hypothetically speaking here, of course - one wished to discredit LW by making the respective RW article as negative as possible, I would expect it to do real damage. But not be any sort of fatal takedown that set a mainstream tone or gave a general population its marching orders, along the lines of Shermer's 'cryonics is a scam because frozen strawberries' or Gould's Mismeasure of Man's 'IQ is racist, involved researchers like Merton faked the data because they are racist, and it caused the Holocaust too'.