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ygert comments on Open Thread, May 26 - June 1, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Lately I've noticed, both here and the wider LW-sphere, a trend towards rationalizing the status quo. For example, pointing out how seemingly irrational behavior might actually be rational when taking into account various factors. Has anyone else noticed the same?
At any rate I'm not sure if this represents an evolution (taking into account more subtleties) or regression (genuine change is too hard so let's rationalize) in the discourse.
What you are observing is part of the phenomenon of meta-contrarianism. Like everything Yvain writes, the aforementioned post is well worth a read.
I don't know. Metacontrarianism, as I understand it, involves taking specific positions solely for the sake of differentiating oneself from others, whereas many of the status quo explanations (e.g. Yvain's recent post on weak men) seem like they actually have definite intellectual merit as well.
My explanation would be more something like "LW was originally quite dominated by Eliezer's ideas, but over time and as people have had the time to think about them more, people have started going off in their own directions and producing new kinds of thoughts that are the kind of synthesis that you get when you've assimilated the LW canon deeply enough and then start combining it with all the other influences and ideas that you run into and think about in your life".
There does seem to be a pattern of (commonly accepted idea/pattern/behavior)/(LW-ish/sequence-related/rational (for some sense of the word) idea/pattern/behavior)/(LW-ish justification of something similar to the commonly accepted idea/pattern/behavior), though. It's similar to the metacontrarianism pattern even if it's not caused by actual metacontrarianism.
There's also the general "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" pattern that intellectual ideas tend to take.
I've read that one - what I was thinking of felt a little different, but maybe it's really the same thing.