Is Less Wrong discouraging less nerdy people from participating?

If arguments over the relative merits of Star Wars and Star Trek became a regular feature of this site, I would feel compelled to burn it to the ground.

It's possible, but I suspect that the proportion of people who're already interested in refining human rationality, encounter the site, and are turned away by the predominant media interests, is extremely low. The degree to which those elements pervade the site is very small compared to the prevalence of the elements that are its actual purpose.

I've never been into science fiction, fantasy literature, anime, or D&D, but the alleged popularity of those on LW has never bothered me, nor even particularly stood out. (I mean, I've liked a few instances of the first three, but never anywhere near the point of being involved in their respective subcultures.)

(Admittedly, I am a nerd along several other dimensions — e.g. I'm a computer/math/science person — but those are a lot more actually relevant to understanding and contributing to LW than anime and sci-fi/fantasy are.)

For example, see this subthread where multiple users discuss how spectator sports are "banal" and "pointless".

Although I didn't write those comments, I think from the context of that subthread, it was intended that spectator sports are "banal" and "pointless" compared to philosophy or existential risk reduction, not arguing over whether Star Wars or Star Trek is superior.

(BTW, I personally think it (arguing over ...) is just as banal and pointless as spectator sports. On the other hand, watching Star Wars or Star Trek is not pointless, since it lets you learn the possibility of things like AI and space travel, which you might not otherwise be aware of. I wrote a post about this.)

If you define nerdiness by the subject matter, then sci fi is nerdy and sports are not. But if you define nerdiness by the approach that people take, then there are plenty of sports nerds (think Bill James, Nate Silver, Moneyball, or this Onion article). Sabermetrics is basically the rationalist approach to sports: figure out what actually helps teams win by collecting the right data, analyzing it appropriately, and following the numbers even if they disagree with established views. This approach is growing rapidly, and has spread to other sports besides baseball (including NBA basketball and NFL football).

Sports could be a gateway drug to a broader interest in rationality, just like scifi/fantasy have been for many people. Maybe we need the sports equivalent of HPMOR?

And here I was thinking it was obscure mathematical gibberish that would discourage non-nerdy people from participating. Instead it's mentioning an idea by a famous author that's scaring them off.

;-)

As one data point, I'm allergic to almost every aspect of the modern American nerd culture, but I don't find it problematic here because I simply tune out any manifestations of it. However, I have an unusual level of ability and inclination to filter out the elements I dislike and concentrate on the interesting stuff whenever I find some venue offering original perspective and insight. I'm sure lots of people find such things more actively repulsive.

Is Less Wrong discouraging less nerdy people from participating?

Why, yes. Yes it is.

You say that like it's a bad thing. But just wait 'till the references to Heinlein and Tolkien are replaced by long discussions about Beyonce and the Super Bowl on Less Wrong. Then, see how you like it.

Seriously, how much of a single, unified purpose does Less Wrong actually serve? I know SIAI has its mission, and the masthead asserts that this forum is devoted to "reforming the art of human rationality." I'm not sure exactly of how these two goals complement each other, or how this forum's contribution to either or both is measured. Personally, I like this forum on a day-to-day basis mostly because it's fun, although I find myself increasingly influenced by its worldview all the time.

So I have, for a while now, had ideas for a couple posts about rationality that use sports as the source for most of the examples. Spectator sports are actually a rich field for rationalist analysis because they are rife with irrationality and there have been a number of recent developments in fixing that. I think sports fans, athletes, coaches and analysts could learn a lot from us and we could learn a lot from them.

Maybe I'll write one and see how it goes.

Incidentally, the way I got into sports (basketball in particular) was by discovering it as this big mystery- where I wasn't quite sure what factors at what degrees were involved in winning. Part of the reason I haven't gotten into baseball is that it's almost a solved problem at this point and I haven't gotten involved in football as it appears to complex for the low-hanging statistical fruit to be of much interest.

I have found being a big sports fan excellent practice for noticing and avoiding tribalism and motivated cognition. I highly recommend it.

The failure mode here doesn't come out of Less Wrong being ontologically nerdy but the potential for it to become teleologically nerdy. To clarify, the topics of analysis that we see here are going to be seen as nerdy by most of the mainstream; short of changing the culture there's no way around that. But assuming that rationality and nerdiness are causally entangled with each other, that epistemic rationality implies nerdiness in other domains or vice versa, is not only wrong but dangerously so.

The community seems to be fairly adept at avoiding the general class of failures that this belongs to; it's managed to stay mostly clear of them in the political domain, for example. That's good. But the wider nerd culture is extremely bad about confusing its cultural preferences with its notion of rationality, as the appropriate fandoms' attitudes toward Justin Bieber listeners, Stephenie Meyer readers, and Wii Fit players should show. At times it can shade into something that almost resembles a religion, as in Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning... Was The Command Line. With this in mind, and bearing in mind that this community is by any measure full of nerds, it ought to be guarded against specifically.

We might end up attracting more and more rational people if we branch our pop-cultural examples out of fandom and into more mainstream domains, though that's only as effective as demographics and cultural norms will allow. But what we lose (or gain) from not doing so is absolutely insignificant compared to the potential bias we could introduce by entangling the myths of our tribe with the laws of the universe.

For example, see this subthread where multiple users discuss how spectator sports are "banal" and "pointless".

I think a careful reading of that subthread shows that you've unfairly taken those comments out of context. Mass Driver's point was that he/she didn't want to take away people's enjoyment of spectator sports, and Nancy Lebovitz was describing a hypothetical scenario where a person loses interest ("find out that spectator sports are pointless"), so that the label referred to that hypothetical person's own hypothetical (future) opinion. And by "multiple users" you apparently meant just those two.

one form of fantastic escapism involving imaginary spaceships

This is a telling misunderstanding of what SF is about.

Harmless tribalist fun is the mind-killer.

I like this post. I don't have an answer to the titular question, but I've wondered the same thing.

I interpret your underlying point to be that LW is used by the most prolific contributors not only as a place to discuss and learn about rationality and related topics, but also as a place to socialize with like-minded people who share their unusual interests in topics such as sci-fi that are not of interest to most people -- and often the socializing aspect is combined with the rationality-dojo aspect in a single post or comment, when people give fun references to sci-fi or D&D or whatever or just go off on tangents about things of interest to them.

There are clearly advantages and disadvantages to not having a norm of encouraging (mostly) 'generic rationality' discussion with no (or minimal) references to things that would be unfamiliar to most (or too many) of the target audience (what is the target audience specifically? how many is too many?).

I don't have a clear idea of what the advantages and disadvantages are, or what the alternatives, but I'm curious how many people who are strongly interested in rationality are turned away by such things. Do we think that many people are seriously discouraged despite having a strong interest in rationality, or are we talking about people who clicked a random link and left immediately because it was "too weird"?