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.

Houshalter comments on Open Thread May 23 - May 29, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 22 May 2016 09:11PM

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

Comments (120)

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

Comment author: Houshalter 24 May 2016 12:36:29PM 0 points [-]

I was just summarizing something I remember reading. I searched for every keyword I can think of but I can't find it.

But I swear there was a post highly critical of lesswrong, and one of the arguments was that. That if such a high percentage of lesswrongers believe in cryonics, why are so few signed up? It was an argument that lesswrong is ineffective.

It was just interesting to me to see the most recent statistics, and a lot of people are signed up, and certainly much higher than the general population.

Comment author: Viliam 25 May 2016 10:13:43AM 0 points [-]

It would be an argument that lesswrongers are not perfect. Also "lesswrongers" includes people who merely read the website once in a while.

I am completely unsurprised by the fact that mere reading LW articles doesn't make people perfect.

I would be more bothered by finding out that "lesswrongers" are less rational than the average population, or just some large enough control group that I could easily join instead of LW. But the numbers abour cryonics do not show that.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 25 May 2016 01:05:16PM 2 points [-]

I think that if LWers are 50,000 times more likely to do something than the general population, that proves neither rationality nor irrationality. It just shows that LWers are chosen by an extremely selective process.