Comment on Is Less Wrong discouraging less nerdy people from participating?

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 22:44:55 GMT

). In fact I'm strongly suspecting pattern-completion here -- inferring other things you think the person would say, but aren't actually present in the cited text.

Hmm, this is a good point. It is possible that I'm engaging in pattern completion or reading more negativity in than is present. It is also possible that that is connected to my own pretty negative attitude towards much of spectator sports. (What is this cognitive error called? If it doesn't have a name I'd suggest The Modest Proposal Bias.)

Whereas it seems to me that someone who actually thought others' interests were worth looking down upon wouldn't have much hesitation about changing them.

I don't think that's a correct reading of his remarks. The point is precisely the opposite as I read it, Mass Driver doesn't want to change their hobbies even as he looks down on them.

That seems like a realistic, non-pejorative description of a fairly large number of actual living people. What part of that description did you find disparaging?

It is realistic for a certain subset, but there's extraneous details that render it disparaging. There are a lot of smart people who went to very good universities who also are fanatics about their local sports team. The apparent working assumption is that those people don't exist or exist in negligible numbers.

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