You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

GabrielDuquette comments on A place for casual, non-karmic discussion for lesswrongers? - Less Wrong Discussion

19 [deleted] 04 November 2012 06:50PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (88)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 November 2012 09:09:36AM *  0 points [-]

I don't know what to tell you about that. It's a different problem from the one you first mentioned.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 November 2012 07:21:53PM 0 points [-]

You're kinda right, but it's still related. It's like we're this very specialized group who drifts away from the concerns of the mainstream more and more, developing our slang and lingo and environment... which wouldn't be different from any other group such as rock geeks or art fandoms or the like... except our focus of geekery is the improvement of the human mind. This makes communicating with defenctive people complicated, because they don't know they're thinking wrong, they'll confuse your cleverness for insanity, and your attempts to help them for arrogance. It's like when you know yoga and talk about it to people and they go "Are you going to teach me how to breathe?" I've had places were I've delcared myself a lesswronger, and where I was told my company was welcome as long as I didn't try to teach them how to think.

And that's just people in general. But there's that subset of people, the normal-normal people, people without dreams, without ambition, without curiosity, without any motivation besides making it to the next month. Talking with those people frustrates me enough as it is, and I fear the company of intelligent, ambitious, witty people such as the ones found here is not going to help assuage that.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 November 2012 08:11:05PM 0 points [-]

This Promethean feeling is temporary, I think. Or at least the prone-to-proselytizing period is temporary. In my experience, you eventually get a better sense of when to shut up and when to introduce doubt. But it can be a tough road in the meantime.