(I originally tried to make this a comment, but it kept on growing.)

I was looking through the Google results for "Less Wrong" when I found the blog of a rather intelligent Leon Kass acolyte, who's written a critique of our community. While it's a bit of a caricature, it's not entirely off the mark. For example:

Trying to think more like a mathematician, whose empiricism resides in the realm of pure thought, does not predispose these 'rationalists' to collect evidence from the real world. Neither does the downplaying of personal experiences. Many are computer science majors, used to being in the comfortable position of being capable of testing their hypotheses without needing to leave their office. It is, then, an easy temptation for them to come up with a nice-sounding theory which appears to explain the facts, and then consider the question solved. Reason must reign supreme, must it not?

How seriously do you take this critique? Do you wonder why I'm bothering with this straw-man criticism of Less Wrong?

Actually, I've deceived you; there's no such Leon Kass devotee. The quote above is a very minor adaptation of this Kaj Sotala post, which I've changed from the first person plural to the third person plural. Read it if you like, and then reevaluate the critique. (Yes, I know it's less coherent out of its actual context.) Does it seem to be less of a caricature now that you've read a version in which you identify with the writer, rather than one in which the writer is analyzing and criticizing you from outside?

Now I hope that this little trick (which people are starting to expect around here) caught your attention. We really do seem to react differently to an outside analysis of a person or group in very different ways, depending on whether we've been primed to identify ourselves more with the author or with the object of analysis. One might say that we strongly object to being modeled as a more or less predictable agent in someone else's scheme: that we instinctively reject any out-group analysis of our own personality and cognition. (Compare people's reluctance to trust the Outside View even when they know it's more reliable.)

In fact, in some ways this is reminiscent of anosognosia: take for instance the recent study on body language, which discovered that

We can predict a stranger's extraversion

...

bayesways

bayesways

bayesways

bayesways