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steven0461 comments on What bothers you about Less Wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: Will_Newsome 19 May 2011 10:23AM

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Comment author: komponisto 19 May 2011 04:29:04PM 23 points [-]

1. Too much emphasis on "altruism" and treatment of "altruists" as a special class. (As opposed to the rest of us who "merely" enjoy doing cool things like theoretical research and art, but also need the world to keep existing for that to continue happening.) No one should have to feel bad about continuing to live in the world while they marginally help to save it.

2. Not enough high-status people, especially scientists and philosophers. Do Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett know about LW? If not, why not? Why aren't they here? What can we do about it? Why aren't a serious-looking design and the logo of an Oxford institute enough to gain credibility? (Exception that proves the rule: Scott Aaronson has LW on his blogroll, but he was reading OB before he was high-status, and so far as I am aware, hasn't ever commented on LW as opposed to OB.)

3. Too much downvoting for disagreement, or for making non-blatant errors.

4. It's not that there are too many meetup posts, it's that there are too few content posts by comparison.

5. I sometimes feel that LW is not quite nice enough (see point 3.). Visiting other internet forums quickly snaps me out of this and puts things into perspective; but I still think we could probably do better.

6. Related to 3. and 5.: sometimes people don't read things carefully before reacting (and voting).

7. Art-related topics don't get enough respect. This fact manifests itself both in blatant ways (low scores for comments that discuss them) and in subtle ways (people make assumptions about what subtopic- and position-space look like in these domains, and show impatience with discussions about whether these assumptions are correct ).

Comment author: steven0461 21 May 2011 11:18:50PM 5 points [-]

Too much emphasis on "altruism" and treatment of "altruists" as a special class. (As opposed to the rest of us who "merely" enjoy doing cool things like theoretical research and art, but also need the world to keep existing for that to continue happening.) No one should have to feel bad about continuing to live in the world while they marginally help to save it.

Are people doing specific things to make you feel bad about "continuing to live in the world", or does mere discussion of altruist-relevant topics among LW altruists make you feel that way?