I have several questions related to this:
- Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?
- If so, can you suggest any easy steps we could take?
- Is it possible that there are aspects of the atmosphere here that are driving away intelligent, rationally inclined people who might otherwise be interested in Less Wrong?
- Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?
- Is it possible that our culture might be different if these folks were hanging around and contributing? Presumably they are disproportionately represented among certain personality types.
If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:
Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.
Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:
Some people consider the Sequences the most important work they have ever read.
Generally, if your comment or post is on-topic, thoughtful, and shows that you're familiar with the Sequences, your comment or post will be upvoted.
Many of us believe in the importance of developing qualities described in Twelve Virtues of Rationality: [insert mystical sounding description of how to be rational here]
And on the sequences page:
If you don't read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, little else on Less Wrong will make much sense.
This seems obviously false to me.
These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.
We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.
In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.
Well, for example, if EY is so confident that he's proven "MWI is obviously true - a proposition far simpler than the argument for supporting SIAI", he should try presenting his argument to some skeptical physicists. Instead, it appears the physicists who have happened to run across his argument found it severely flawed.
How rational is it to think that you've found a proof most physicists are wrong and then never run it by any physicists to see if you're right?
I do not believe that.
As for why SI's approach is dangerous, I think Holden put it well in the most upvoted post on the site.
I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I just find it striking.
BTW, it's important to note that by some polls an actual majority of theoretical physicists now believe in MWI, and this was true well before I wrote anything. My only contributions are in explaining the state of the issue to nonphysicists (I am a good explainer), formalizing the gross probability-theoretic errors of some critiques of MWI (I am a domain expert at that part), and stripping off a lot of soft understatement that many physicists have to do for fear of offending sillier colleagues (i.e., they know how incredibly stupid the Copenhagen interpret... (read more)