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Perrr333 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - LessWrong
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Hello all, I'm new to this site. I've stumbled across this website a few times, and have been interested in its implications on philosophy. I am here in a position of scepticism about the claims and projects this site wishes to advance. I suspect most of my posts in the recent future will be critiques of other things found on this website. I hope I make some friends, and not too many enemies.
What do you understand those to be?
I do not fully know yet.
What do you mean when you say you are skeptic of ideas that you don't know?
You do not need to fully understand something to approach it with skeptically.
Yes, but then it says more about your general approach to things you don't understand then it says something about the subject.
You also didn't answer the question. What do you actually mean when you say, that you are skeptic?
No; it tells you about my approach to LessWrong based on what I know of LessWrong. I hope you are familiar with the word skeptic. If not, I recommend you read a dictionary entry on it, and perhaps look up its usage in literature. If you mean "what precisely do I mean when I say I am a approaching LessWrong skeptically", I mean that I will be reading carefully through articles on LessWrong, looking for potential flaws and failings, and generally maintaining a high degree of doubt over anything said or implied.
I have to add that this welcoming thread isn't very welcoming.
I'm familiar enough to know that different people use it to mean different things. Asking people to explain in detail what they mean is called "tabooing" on LW. It helps with rational thinking.
Of course your are skeptic about the value of explaining what you mean. That's alright. It takes mental effort to value clear thinking and most people are not used to engage in that effort.
This might seem unwelcoming because I don't allow you to easily get away with a vague statement and confront you on an intellectual level. But that's not the point, I welcome you by engaging you.
Yeah, you would not make a good host if you welcomed your guests by interrogating them. 'Of course your are skeptic about the value of explaining what you mean' - what on earth does this mean? 'It takes mental effort to value clear thinking and most people are not used to engage in that effort' - great concealed insult. Not quite obvious enough to make you look bad, but with enough "I'm superior to you"-ness to put me down. 'This might seem unwelcoming because I don't allow you to easily get away with a vague statement and confront you on an intellectual level' - nope, it's unwelcoming because you are excessively pedantic, and because you aren't very nice (e.g. the concealed insult).
As a note, I do not have the time nor patience to look through everything linked to me. Also, how do you quote on this website?
What you call "pedantry", some people call "clear communication".
I don't want to sound condescending, but to understand discussions, you may have to. This is not an absolute rule, but it is a good rule of thumb that when someone links you somewhere, it's a good idea to at least click on that link.
Quotes are written by prefacing whatever you want to quote with a "greater-than" character: ">". For instance, "> Hello." would appear as
EDIT: Also, note that this notation only works if you begin your quote on a new line. Using a ">" symbol in the middle of a paragraph, for instance, won't do anything.
Being a good host means creating an environment in which the right people feel welcome. On LW the right people happen to be people who like to explain how they reason.
You started by saying you are skeptical about this website way of handling things.
I answered with a standard way of this websites way of handling things. Asking you to taboo a term you used, without specifically using the word "taboo" because it's internal jargon.
As you said at the beginning you are indeed skeptical of ideas of this website. Tabooing happens to be one of them. It's a new concept for you and for you being skeptical is not about philosophical skepticism but about having a high bar to adopting new concepts.
This is generally referred to around here as "maintaining good epistemic hygiene", and it's considered a fairly normal practice. There's no particular need to give it a special name like "skepticism", especially when that word already has a philosophical meaning.
Moreover, if you come onto any website (not just LessWrong) and say something like "I am here in a position of scepticism about the claims and projects this site wishes to advance," naturally people will think you are referring to specific claims. If they then ask you which claims you are referring to, and you say "I don't know," it's only expected that people will react with confusion and (probably) will not warm up all that much to you. It's almost like a sort of bait-and-switch; you start off (seemingly) claiming one thing (either explicitly or implicitly) and then reveal that you were talking about something else all along. We have a name for that on this site as well: logical rudeness.
In general, saying (or implying, at least) in your first comment on a new site you are joining that you disagree with many of its claims is not likely to lead to welcoming responses. This is not because residents are trying to be unpleasant; rather, it is because they are simply following the flow of the conversation. Consider the following exchange:
B's response is something of a nonsequitur, and in fact does not address what most people would perceive to be the meat of A's comment: that A is skeptical of many of the claims this site has to offer. More realistic would be the following conversation:
And if you look closely at the first two comments in this thread, you'll see that this is exactly what happened. Nothing hostile going on. If A then goes on to reply "I don't know", well, then people might start to find A's position slightly strange. But there's no "unwelcoming" vibe going on here, I don't think.
(But since you are correct that no one actually welcomed you, let me be the first: Welcome to LessWrong!)
I am aware of the philosophical meaning. If you don't mind, I'd prefer to just use regular terminology rather than your site-specific terminology. I've been around the block of debating sites, and none of them have gotten so defensive when I've simply stating I'm approaching their claims skeptically. Stating you wish to approach something skeptically without stating exactly what you are approaching seems sensible to me.
Also, it seems rather silly to me that your response to me effectively saying "I feel unwelcome" is "Every reply has been legitimate!!!!". I didn't say anyone had been unreasonable, I just said I feel unwelcome. And your reply certainly hasn't changed that.
Then you should be aware that the way in which you used the term is not in line with its philosophical meaning.
This was not, in fact, your original wording. From your original comment:
Specifically, you singled out "this site", i.e. LessWrong, as the one whose claims you were approaching skeptically, suggesting that there was something in particular about LessWrong which you found disagreeable. The connotations of your original comment and the ones you are offering now are radically different, even if they may be denotatively similar. The practice of picking up on (and sending) said connotations is a crucial element of any social interaction, so if people are apparently interpreting your words incorrectly, you should take that as evidence that you were unclear and seek to be more clear in the future, rather than waste time defending your original wording. A simple "Sorry, you misunderstood me; this is what I actually meant" would have sufficed.
Again, your original wording:
This is not a statement about your own state of mind; rather it is a claim of what (presumably) you regard as an objective aspect of this thread (whether it is "welcoming" or not). Again, your time could better be spent simply providing a clarification rather than arguing that said clarification is what you said in the first place. No need to bring up "I didn't say this; I said that"; instead, just say "I meant to say that".
As a more general statement: LessWrong as a community places extremely great emphasis on clear communication. Often, we find that a good majority of disagreements can be avoided simply by having all participants state their position clearly in the beginning, rather than having said position remain unclear or nebulously defined, eventually devolving into arguments about the definition of a word, or some such. If you view this thread in light of this, you'll see that none of this is intended as an attack, as you (seem to) have been perceiving it as. We are simply trying to encourage clear communication, and clean up misunderstandings.
This is no debating side. It a side for rational discourse about how to reason. As such we talk about the subject of how to reason. Not to defend something but because we care about how to reason and your particular way of reasoning.
You said that you don't understand what the website is about and people try to explain it to you. If you don't want to understand the local terminology you won't understand LW.
You didn't you said people acted unwelcome. That's something different than saying you feel unwelcome even by conventional standards of language.