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.

Eugine_Nier comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion

21 Post author: Apprentice 06 January 2014 12:16AM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (866)

Comments (866)

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

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 January 2014 07:30:46AM 4 points [-]

LessWrong could easily be three communities:

  • a rationality forum (based on the sequences and similar, focused on technique and practice rather than applying to particular issues)

  • a transhumanist forum (for existential risk, cryonics, FAI and similar)

  • an object-level discussion/debate forum (for specific topics like feminism, genetic engineering, neoreactionism, etc).

I'm not sure that would work. After all, Bayes's rule has fairly obvious unPC consequences when applied to race or gender, and thinking seriously about transhumanism will require dealing with eugenics-like issues.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 January 2014 10:11:40AM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure that would work. After all, Bayes's rule has fairly obvious unPC consequences when applied to race or gender,

“rather than applying to particular issues”

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 January 2014 09:01:26PM 6 points [-]

That would simply result in people treating Bayesianism as if it's a separate magisterium from everyday life.

Comment author: jaibot 13 January 2014 01:45:01PM 2 points [-]

Think of it as the no-politics rule turned up to 11.The point is not that these things can't be reasoned about, but that the strong (negative/positve) affect attached to certain things makes them ill-suited to rationalist pedagogy.

Lowering the barrier to entry doesn't mean you can't have other things further up the incline, though.

Comment author: Error 13 January 2014 07:35:01PM 4 points [-]

Datapoint: I find that I spend more time reading the politically-charged threads and subthreads than other content, but get much less out of them. They're like junk food; interesting but not useful. On the other hand, just about anywhere other than LW, they're not even interesting.

(on running a memory-check, I find that observation applies mostly to comment threads. There's been a couple of top-level political articles that I genuinely learned something from)

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit