What topics are appropriate for LessWrong?

tog

For example, what would be inappropriately off topic to post to LessWrong discussion about?

I couldn't find an answer in the FAQ. (Perhaps it'd be worth adding one.) The closest I could find was this:

What is Less Wrong?

Less Wrong is an online community for discussion of rationality. Topics of interest include decision theory, philosophy, self-improvement, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, game theory, metamathematics, logic, evolutionary psychology, economics, and the far future.

However "rationality" can be interpreted broadly enough that rational discussion of anything would count, and my experience reading LW is compatible with this interpretation being applied by posters. Indeed my experience seems to suggest that practically everything is on topic; political discussion of certain sorts is frowned upon, but not due to being off topic. People often post about things far removed from the topics of interest. And some of these topics are very broad: it seems that a lot of material about self-improvement is acceptable, for instance.

For example, what would be inappropriately off topic to post to LessWrong discussion about?

I couldn't find an answer in the FAQ. (Perhaps it'd be worth adding one.) The closest I could find was this:

What is Less Wrong?

Less Wrong is an online community for discussion of rationality. Topics of interest include decision theory, philosophy, self-improvement, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, game theory, metamathematics, logic, evolutionary psychology, economics, and the far future.

Can you pretty please stop pressing me on this point? It's NOT important to me, like I said, I believe it's marginal to the discussion; I'm not at all interested in sustaining a debate on the rationality of autists and only interested in getting my point across.

Yes, I believe Spock-like people display what looks to me as a kind of irrationality, although doubtlessly to them it looks like super-rationality. That is all.

Can we let it go? Now?

Awestruck as I am by your insight

Stop that.

You may or may not have already realized this, but I felt the tautological emphasis was necessary because some people view the humanistic mindset as a bug rather than a feature in human thought. I see the lack of it as a bug rather than a feature.

f you think, or are pretending to think, that FrameBenignly was proposing that the topics s/he listed are poor choices for LW because the people here can't understand them

No, that's not what I think. What I think is that any crowd who requires such limitations in order to be able to have productive conversations is worse than the average human at handling these topics, rather than better than the average human at avoiding flamebait. Because they're not particularly outrageous. That's why I said it makes me sad -- because I have a higher opinion of LessWrongers.

Can you pretty please stop pressing me on this point?

The thing is, you just accidentally punched downon a vulnerable group. Autistic people constantly struggle with people perceiving them as robotic types who can't appreciate art and stuff (it's not really true at all).

If someone said "it's very niggerish", you'd understand the offense, right? It wouldn't be acceptable if you didn't really mean "niggerish", just traits stereotypically associated with the group being slandered.

So don't use "autist" as an adjective for thing... (read more)

5gjm11y

Sure, I'll drop it if you will. (With the brief observation that it's not like you've either expressed any sort of regret for shit-talking autistic people, or given any justification for your doing so. So it's not like I've been going on about a topic that's been resolved.) Perhaps it is worth making it explicit why I have made an issue of this even though it is NOT important to Dahlen (a weighty consideration, to be sure). There are quite a lot of people on LW who are somewhere on the autistic spectrum (look up a recent annual survey if you want the numbers). The ones I know about appear to me to be just as valuable to LW as other people here. And it seems to me that it is not good practice to use these people as some kind of byword for irrationality, as you have been doing, or to suggest that they are interchangeable with "automatons". Because it's (1) unpleasant for them and (2) bad for LW if those people decide to leave because they're being used as a punching bag. And nothing in what you've said so far gives any reason to think that you see any problem with that. ... Oh, I see you aren't quite done yet. I'll respond to the rest of what you say, and then I'm done if you are. [...] You are not, as the saying goes, the boss of me. [...] Yes, I did understand that you were doing it for emphasis. And I was doing what I did for mockery, because I thought (and still think) what you were emphasizing was silly and unpleasant -- the point at issue was never whether the lack of a skill is the lack of a skill, or whether the lack of a skill is unimportant, or whether there are skills that autistic people (by definition) tend to lack. And also because when I see people making unpleasant comments about autism on LW, either the explicit meaning or the clear subtext is always something like "ha ha, look at these freaks. I'm so much better than they are". (So there was a certain amount of irony in the air when you kindly warned me of the danger of saying things to feel b

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What topics are appropriate for LessWrong?

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What topics are appropriate for LessWrong?

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