Scott's examples have a fair amount of selection bias. If you take Chile, Russia, NK, or Zimbabwe, those who play dirty prevail. However, I agree that building a walled garden and making it attractive to join is a far better strategy whenever feasible.
This is class bias though. Some people are not in a position to create and live in a walled garden, either in real life or on the internet, especially in places without an internet connection. Sure its great for the kind of people who use less wrong, educated, white middle class, mainly male (as I know there are several women who post regularly), obviously internet access, lots of free time to write intense blog posts.
I suppose you may cancelled this out with whenever feasible, but I also suspect the average less wrong poster would not be a good judge of f...
Scott, known on LessWrong as Yvain, recently wrote a post complaining about an inaccurate rape statistic.
Arthur Chu, who is notable for winning money on Jeopardy recently, argued against Scott's stance that we should be honest in arguments in a comment thread on Jeff Kaufman's Facebook profile, which can be read here.
Scott just responded here, with a number of points relevant to the topic of rationalist communities.
I am interested in what LW thinks of this.
Obviously, at some point being polite in our arguments is silly. I'd be interested in people's opinions of how dire the real world consequences have to be before it's worthwhile debating dishonestly.