I don't know Terry Pratchett's thinking behind the character, but Carrot strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum of the concept.
I don't think it's a reductio. Actually, I think it's almost the opposite; one of Pratchett's usual schticks is drawing up exaggerated social and political concepts that look absurd on their faces but later turn out to make internal sense. Looked at in that light, it's pretty clear what's going on: Carrot isn't phenotypically a dwarf, but he's culturally a dwarf, and he's accepted as such by Pratchett's dwarves because, to them, dwarvishness is less about being short and beardy and more about the culture. Wearing mail to dinner, being intimately familiar with mine engineering, baking bread that doubles as an assault weapon, et cetera. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the situation Pratchett had in mind was something like being adopted into a religious group normally associated with another ethnicity: his dwarves very often play on religious and traditional themes.
As Pratchett's developed Discworld's dwarvish culture more, this has started to make less sense, but the series isn't particularly good at long-term thematic continuity.
It's that time of year again.
If you are reading this post and self-identify as a LWer, then you are the target population for the Less Wrong Census/Survey. Please take it. Doesn't matter if you don't post much. Doesn't matter if you're a lurker. Take the survey.
This year's census contains a "main survey" that should take about ten or fifteen minutes, as well as a bunch of "extra credit questions". You may do the extra credit questions if you want. You may skip all the extra credit questions if you want. They're pretty long and not all of them are very interesting. But it is very important that you not put off doing the survey or not do the survey at all because you're intimidated by the extra credit questions.
It also contains a chance at winning a MONETARY REWARD at the bottom. You do not need to fill in all the extra credit questions to get the MONETARY REWARD, just make an honest stab at as much of the survey as you can.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the simplest and most obvious possible way. For example, if it asks you "What language do you speak?" please answer "English" instead of "I speak English" or "It's English" or "English since I live in Canada" or "English (US)" or anything else. This will help me sort responses quickly and easily. Likewise, if a question asks for a number, please answer with a number such as "4", rather than "four".
The planned closing date for the survey is Friday, November 14. Instead of putting the survey off and then forgetting to do it, why not fill it out right now?
Okay! Enough preliminaries! Time to take the...
***
[EDIT: SURVEY CLOSED, DO NOT TAKE!]
***
Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because of some limitations in Google Docs, concern about survey length, and contradictions/duplications among suggestions. The current survey is a mess and requires serious shortening and possibly a hard and fast rule that it will never get longer than it is right now.
By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.