a lot of lot of horrible, horrible stuff that I never, ever want to be associated with.
As a lurker and relatively new person to this community I've now seen this sentiment expressed multiple places but without any specific examples. Could you (or anyone else) please provide some? I'd really like to know more about this before I start talking about Less Wrong to my friends/family/coworkers/etc.
Feel free to PM me if you don't want to discuss it publicly.
A lot of this content is concentrated among the users who eventually created MoreRight. Check out that site for a concentrated dose of what also pops up here.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.