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Armok_GoB comments on What bothers you about Less Wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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There are way to many amazing posts with very little karma and mediocre posts with large amounts of karma.
Not enough productive projects related to the site, like site improvements and art. The few that do show up get to little attention and karma.
To much discussion about things like meetups and growing the community and converting people. Those things are important but they dosn't belong on LW and should probably have their own site.
There is a category of religiously inspired posts that creep me out and set of cult alarms. It contains that post about staring from Scientology and that Transcendental meditation stuff that while I found it interesting and perhaps useful doesn't seem to belong on LW and now recently these Mormon posts abut growing organizations. shudder
What I'm about to say has been said before, but it bears repeating. What exactly about all this stuff is setting off cult alarms for you? I had a similar problem with those posts as well, until I actually went and questioned the cult alarm in my head (which was a gut reaction) and realized that it might not be a rational reaction. Just because some scary group does something does not make it a bad thing, even if they're the only people that do it -- reversed stupidity is not intelligence. And a number of those things suggested sound like good, self-improvement suggestions, which are free of religious baggage.
In general, when you're creeped out by something, you should try to figure out why you're being creeped out instead of merely accepting what the feeling suggests. Otherwise you could end up doing something bad that you wouldn't have done if you'd thought it through. Which is of course the basic purpose of the teachings on this site.
I don't know how the cult alarms work, they're intuitive. I know all those things and indeed it's probably a false alarm but I thought I should mention it anyway.
Still, if religious orgs have anything to say to rationalists about rationality then somehting, somewhere, is very very wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not the case or that we shouldn't listen to them, but at the very least we should have noticed the stuff they're saying on our own long ago.
I never actually stated that I accepted what the feeling said, only that I HAD the feeling. I am in fact unsure of what to think and thus I'm trying to forward the raw data I'm working from (my intuitions) rather than my interpretation of what they mean. I should have made that clearer.
Besides, regardless of if the feeling of being creeped out is justified or not the fact they creep people out is a problem and they should try to communicate the same ideas in ways that don't creep people out so much. I don't like being creeped out.
Ah, ok, I misunderstood you then. Sorry, and thanks for clearing that up.
I don't agree that religious organizations having something to say to rationalists about rationality is a bad thing -- they've been around much, much longer than rationalists have, and have had way more time to come up with good ideas. And the reason why they needed suggest it instead of working it out on their own is probably because of the very thing I was trying to warn against -- in general, we as a community tend to look at religious organizations as bad, and so tend to color everything they do with the same feeling of badness, which makes the things that are actually good harder to notice.
I also do not like being creeped out. But I assume the creepiness factor comes from the context (i.e. if the source of the staring thing was never mentioned, would it have been creepy to you?) But this is probably only doable in some cases and not others (the source of meditation is known to everyone) and I'm not entirely sure removing the context is a good thing to do anyways, if all we want to do is avoid the creepiness factor. I'll have to think about that. Being creeped out and deconstructing it instead of shying away is a good thing, and trains you to do it more automatically more often... but if we want the ideas to be accepted and used to make people stronger, would it not be best to state them in a way that is most acceptable? I don't know.
Since this seems specifically directed to me I'll say "I agree" in this actual comment rather than only upvoting.
I agree.
Nick Szabo has a good essay about why we should expect (religious) traditions to contain valuable insights.
seconded. tradition as a computational shortcut is a very important insight that I have tried (and mostly failed) to communicate to others.
more generally, memes take advantage of consistent vulnerabilities in human reasoning to transmit themselves. the fact that they use this propagation method says nothing about the value of their memetic payload.
we should pay attention to successful memes if we want to generate new successful memes.
Your first and second paragraph somewhat contradict each other - I agree that some traditions may be undervalued by people who'd prefer to reinvent things from whole cloth (from a software engineering perspective: rewriting a complex system you don't understand is risky), but as you say, traditions may have been selected for self-relication more than for their actual value to humans.
If you consider selection at the family, village or tribe/nation level, maybe tradition's "fitness" is how much they help the people that follow them, but many traditions are either quite recent, or evolved in a pretty different environment. So I don't know how much value to attribute to tradition in general.
More than a teenage atheist typing in all caps, less than an evangelical :p
But seriously, I think us geeky types tend toward the a priori solution in far too many circumstances. We like things neat and tidy. Untangling traditional social hierarchies and looking for lessons seems to appeal to very few.
Hmm, I just came up with a good framing metaphor to make it seem less creepy; Biomimicrying viruses for usage in gene therapy. Not very useful for purposes other than that thou.
I actually agree with this statement.
I think meetups and discussions about community belong on LW, but occasionally these seem to presume "we've figured all these things out, now we just have to spread them". Even the usage of "we" can be dangerously setting LW readers apart from others. If there is an overarching goal to a LW-based community, it would be better framed as how to be a capable and informative group that others would be interested in than how to attract people per se.
Yea... Still, there's WAY to much of it relative actual content.
The meditation post wasn't about Transcendental meditation.
New meetup groups mostly draw on the site, so exiling them to a different site will probably kill them off. If you had them just post on the site when they're new, you'd wind up with pretty much exactly what we have right now -- the established groups don't regularly post meetup notices.