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.
How do you know? Multiple leaders at least dilute the problem.
I've read it. There's some time I'll never get back.
Not what I meant. Those can be studied anywhere. "MWI is the correct interpretation of QM" is an example of dogma.
Other rationalists manage without it.
No, I am referring to mind-killing aspects of the mythos: it fools people into thinking they are Saving the World This sense of self-importance is yet another mind killer. Instead of examining ideas dispassionaely,a s they should, they develop a mentality of "No, don't take my important world-saving role away from me! I cannot tolerate any criticism of these ideas, because then I will go back to being an ordinary person".
Is this nonsense ?
It contains five misspellings in a single paragraph: "utimately" "canot" "statees" "hvae" "ontoogical" which might themselves be enough for a downvote, regardless of content.
As for the is-ought problem, if we accept that "ought" is just a matter of calculations in our brain returning an output (and reject that it's a matter of e.g. our brain receiving supernatural instruction from some non-physical soul), then the "ought" is describable in terms of the world-that-is,... (read more)