Konkvistador comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion
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Thanks for posting this! I agree with Submitter B that LW can be cold and unfriendly and that this seems to be a general failure mode of the kind of people who post on LW. 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 and that to counter this we should cultivate a norm of upvoting nice comments.
Users who feel this way are one of the best features of the community.
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.
Wikipedia never finishes.