You may know me as the guy who posts a lot of controversial stuff about LW and MIRI. I don't enjoy doing this and do not want to continue with it. One reason being that the debate is turning into a flame war. Another reason is that I noticed that it does affect my health negatively (e.g. my high blood pressure (I actually had a single-sided hearing loss over this xkcd comic on Friday)).
This all started in 2010 when I encountered something I perceived to be wrong. But the specifics are irrelevant for this post. The problem is that ever since that time there have been various reasons that made me feel forced to continue the controversy. Sometimes it was the urge to clarify what I wrote, other times I thought it was necessary to respond to a reply I got. What matters is that I couldn't stop. But I believe that this is now possible, given my health concerns.
One problem is that I don't want to leave possible misrepresentations behind. And there very likely exist misrepresentations. There are many reasons for this, but I can assure you that I never deliberately lied and that I never deliberately tried to misrepresent anyone. The main reason might be that I feel very easily overwhelmed and never had the ability to force myself to invest the time that is necessary to do something correctly if I don't really enjoy doing it (for the same reason I probably failed school). Which means that most comments and posts are written in a tearing hurry, akin to a reflexive retraction from the painful stimulus.
<tldr>
I hate this fight and want to end it once and for all. I don't expect you to take my word for it. So instead, here is an offer:
I am willing to post counterstatements, endorsed by MIRI, of any length and content[1] at the top of any of my blog posts. You can either post them in the comments below or send me an email (da [at] kruel.co).
</tldr>
I have no idea if MIRI believes this to be worthwhile. But I couldn't think of a better way to solve this dilemma in a way that everyone can live with happily. But I am open to suggestions that don't stress me too much (also about how to prove that I am trying to be honest).
You obviously don't need to read all my posts. It can also be a general statement.
I am also aware that LW and MIRI are bothered by RationalWiki. As you can easily check from the fossil record, I have at points tried to correct specific problems. But, for the reasons given above, I have problems investing the time to go through every sentence to find possible errors and attempt to correct it in such a way that the edit is not reverted and that people who feel offended are satisfied.
[1] There are obviously some caveats regarding the content, such as no nude photos of Yudkowsky ;-)
I was a little bit at first, but then I tried clicking "random page" a few times to get a sense of what RationalWiki is like as a whole. Other than stubs, every page I landed on contained an attack of some sort. Being upset about a RationalWiki entry being unfair and negative is... like being upset about Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary being linguistically inaccurate. It doesn't really matter and that's not really what they do.
I'm bothered by it more than you are I guess. I mean, for people already involved in the rationality community maybe RationalWiki can just be seen as some silly vindictive website dressed up as a place to learn. But I feel like RationalWiki has decent pagerank and random people do get sent there in google searches. To have that site be the first or one of the first introductions a person has to a given rationality topic seems pretty destructive.