Making fun of things is actually really easy if you try even a little bit. Nearly anything can be made fun of, and in practice nearly anything is made fun of. This is concerning for several reasons.
First, if you are trying to do something, whether or not people are making fun of it is not necessarily a good signal as to whether or not it's actually good. A lot of good things get made fun of. A lot of bad things get made fun of. Thus, whether or not something gets made fun of is not necessarily a good indicator of whether or not it's actually good.[1] Optimally, only bad things would get made fun of, making it easy to determine what is good and bad - but this doesn't appear to be the case.
Second, if you want to make something sound bad, it's really easy. If you don't believe this, just take a politician or organization that you like and search for some criticism of it. It should generally be trivial to find people that are making fun of it for reasons that would sound compelling to a casual observer - even if those reasons aren't actually good. But a casual observer doesn't know that and thus can easily be fooled.[2]
Further, the fact that it's easy to make fun of things makes it so that a clever person can find themselves unnecessarily contemptuous of anything and everything. This sort of premature cynicism tends to be a failure mode I've noticed in many otherwise very intelligent people. Finding faults with things is pretty trivial, but you can quickly go from "it's easy to find faults with everything" to "everything is bad." This tends to be an undesirable mode of thinking - even if true, it's not particularly helpful.
[1] Whether or not something gets made fun of by the right people is a better indicator. That said, if you know who the right people are you usually have access to much more reliable methods.
[2] If you're still not convinced, take a politician or organization that you do like and really truly try to write an argument against that politician or organization. Note that this might actually change your opinion, so be warned.
I find that reply easier to follow, thanks.
The last sentence of katydee's post doesn't raise a red flag for me, I guess because I interpret it differently. I don't read it as an argument against changing one's opinion in itself, but as a reminder that the activity in footnote 2 isn't just an idle exercise, and could lead to changing one's mind on the basis of a cherry-picked argument (since the exercise is explicitly about trying to write an ad hoc opposing argument — it's not about appraising evidence in a balanced, non-selective way). Warning people about changing their minds on the basis of that filtered evidence is reasonable.
I'm not too worried that inferential silence is a big enough problem on LW to merit its own discussion. While it is a problem, it's not clear there's an elegant way to fix it, and I don't think LW suffers from it unusually badly; it seems like something that occurs routinely whenever humans try to communicate. As such the presence of inferential silence on LW doesn't say anything special about LW.
The paragraph about LW being a cult where "everyone's here to abdicate responsibility of thought to the collective" comes off to me as overblown. I'm not sure what LW's "memetic rationalized apathy" is, either.
It looks like we interpret "making fun" differently. To me "making fun" connotes a verbal reaction, not just a laugh and a shrug. "Ha ha, get a load of this stupid idea!" is making fun, and hinges on the implicit bad (because circular) argument that an idea's bad because it's stupid. But a lone laugh or an apathetic shrug isn't making fun, because there's no real engagement; they're just immediate & visible emotional reactions. So, as I see it, making fun often does rely on making bad arguments, even if those arguments are so transparently poor we hardly even register them as arguments. Anyway, in this paragraph, I'm getting into an argument about the meaning of a phrase, and arguments about the meanings of words & phrases risk being sterile, so I'd better stop here.
The problem is that most opinions people hold, even those of LessWrong's users, are already based on filtered evidence. If confirmation bias wasn't the default state of human affairs, it wouldn't be a problem so noteworthy as to gain widespread understanding. (There are processes that can cause illegitimate spreading, but that isn't the case with confirmation bias.) When you sit down to do the exercise and realize legitimate arguments (not merely ad hoc arguments) against your own views, you're overcoming your confirmation bias (default) on that issue for ... (read more)