eli_sennesh comments on Beyond Statistics 101 - Less Wrong
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You asked about emotional stuff so here is my perspective. I have extremely weird feelings about this whole forum that may affect my writing style. My view is constantly popping back and forth between different views, like in the rabbit-duck gestalt image. On one hand I often see interesting and very good arguments, but on the other hand I see tons of red flags popping up. I feel that I need to maintain extreme mental efforts to stay "sane" here. Maybe I should refrain from commenting. It's a pity because I'm generally very interested in the topics discussed here, but the tone and the underlying ideology is pushing me away. On the other hand I feel an urge to check out the posts despite this effect. I'm not sure what aspect of certain forums have this psychological effect on my thinking, but I've felt it on various reddit communities as well.
Seconded, actually, and it's particular to LessWrong. I know I often joke that posting here gets treated as submitting academic material and skewered accordingly, but that is very much what it feels like from the inside. It feels like confronting a hostile crowd of, as Jonah put it, radical agnostics, every single time one posts, and they're waiting for you to say something so they can jump down your throat about it.
Oh, and then you run into the issue of having radically different priors and beliefs, so that you find yourself on a "rationality" site where someone is suddenly using the term "global warming believer" as though the IPCC never issued multiple reports full of statistical evidence. I mean, sure, I can put some probability on, "It's all a conspiracy and the official scientists are lying", but for me that's in the "nonsense zone" -- I actually take offense to being asked to justify my belief in mainstream science.
As much as "good Bayesians" are never supposed to agree to disagree, I would very much like if people would be up-front about their priors and beliefs, so that we can both decide whether it's worth the energy spent on long threads of trying to convince people of things.