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.

Konkvistador comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion

29 [deleted] 15 February 2013 01:43AM

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

Comments (590)

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

Comment author: [deleted] 15 February 2013 11:18:37AM *  22 points [-]

I think people feel like they shouldn't post a comment unless it either contains an insight or a counterargument to someone else's argument

Users who feel this way are one of the best features of the community.

Comment author: Pentashagon 15 February 2013 08:48:59PM -1 points [-]

A discussion board seems to me like a very strange place to have that kind of rigorous discussion. It seems like it belongs in a wiki (or similar) where only the talk/discussion page has historical arguments, counterarguments, and contextual comments, but the main article is just the finished argument. I find it hard to follow a discussion thread where individual portions of an argument appear in different comments (sometimes entirely different articles) with little or no context. Perhaps I am misinterpreting the degree to which you think extraneous comments should be excluded. Or perhaps there is too little re-posting of improved arguments once the discussion has finished. Or too little use of the existing wiki.

The best example I can think of is the metamath.org proof explorer. It's composed mostly of rigorous derivations of theorems that (conveniently for mathematical arguments) can be checked for correctness by a computer, but with clarifying comments where necessary and a history of abandoned theorems and definitions with explanations.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 18 February 2013 11:02:38AM 0 points [-]

the finished argument

Wikipedia never finishes.