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Lu93 comments on Ideas on growth of the community - Less Wrong
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That is arguing with substance. Say there is probability x someone is like you. Talking about your personality, not genes. N is number of people outside LW. In the first approximation, where "person is a member of LW" is independant of "person is like you." you have (1-x)^N to be right. I have 1-(1-x)^N to be right. If N is big, my probability goes to 1, your goes to 0.
Now, you can say, my approximation is false, which it is. LW influenced you, etc, so there is a correlation. However, unless correlation is 1, there is still a probability for someone to be outside of LW and like you, and if there is a large number N, my probability is still going to 1 and yours is still approaching 0. Exponentially. Now, you can narrow the choice by demanding more similarities, and then this growth would not be strong enough to make up for the smallness of x. But we are talking about someone who could give equal contribution to LW as you(edit: and who would like to develop art of rationality), you can't diminish x too much.
It is pretty shitty someone is down-voting you, you are just making a very common mistake of underestimating exponential growth. They could at least tell you what mistake did you make.
The problem is that you don't focus on the intent of the statement. You try to find a meaning in the statement that's wrong and then focus on that. That goes against the idea of "refuting the central point". Instead of trying to understand where I'm coming from you assume that I haven't thought about what I'm saying.
"Like you" is a very vague category.
There a good chance that you engage in the typical mind fallacy. Your personality is more or less normal and therefore there are a lot of people like you outside.
My own personality is not normal but shaped in contexts. It's shaped by things like doing QS community building where I explained to journalist why QS is the new thing. It's also shaped by Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy.
That's not what "like me" means. A professor of psychology is in many ways not like me but he might still contribute to developing the art of rationality.
My argument doesn't rest on the fact that LW influenced me. The QS community is not the LW community even when it's no accident that I meet.
That's still the kind of passive aggressive communication that Jiro complained about.