RationalWiki's take on LW

Moldbug claims that American liberalism is a descendent of American Puritanism and, as such, there is no irony in a Puritan-descended church being liberal.

It's really a skeptics' wiki. And just as there's absolutely no cluefulness bar to being an atheist, there's not much cluefulness bar to being a skeptic. The name skepticwiki.org was already taken when it started. (Though they've since given up and redirected their site to RW! I've suggested the RationalWiki Foundation buy the name from them - we've already taken on evowiki.org, for example.)

LW seems to have ideology about MWI, cryonics, etc.

What do you think the word "ideology" means?

Describing it as a "heavily ideological website" when it's nothing of the sort is not how I would steel-man your argument, and may not serve your advocacy of said argument optimally.

I'm surprised that you perceive this characterization as controversial and unfair. From what I've seen, RW articles engage in scathing rhetoric of ideological warfare constantly and unabashedly, and their ideological perspective is, as far as I can tell, remarkably uniform and consistent.

The only way one could object to my characterization is if one agrees with the ideological positions of RW to such degree that one sees them as objectively correct, i.e. a matter of mere common sense and rational thinking, so that characterizing them as "ideological" would by itself be a dishonest rhetorical ploy. Now, I can accept this argument when it comes to the RW articles that sneer at, say, various physics crackpots (although even there, one wonders why the authors find it a worthwhile use of their time). However, I don't see how one could extend it to topics that are inherently heavily ideological and where we have nothing like the solid epistemological base that exists in hard sciences, like for example economics, history, politics, etc. Yet, from what I've seen, RW articles on such topics sneer and jeer with the same strength of conviction.

What are the best example articles of what you're talking about, and what's wrong with their positions? (If possible, pick something bronze or better... )

To avoid any possibility of cherry-picking, I'll take the links on top of the main page of RW. The first one is RW's article about itself, so I hope I can be pardoned if I skip that one. The next one is an article about "pseudoscience." So what does RW tell us about pseudoscience?

What it tells us is, basically, that "science" should be understood as the bureaucratic system implemented by the contemporary academia, and "pseudoscience" as any effort at finding truth that doesn't have the official imprimatur of this system. For an especially blatant example of this, consider their bizarre claim that peer review is somehow an essential part of science -- whereas in reality, as anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the history of science knows, peer review is a bureaucratic innovation that has been widely imposed only in the decades since WW2, and science had functioned perfectly well for centuries before that. Also, the writers seem to be badly confused about the difference between peer review and the truly important fundamental issue of replication. (By the way, one wonders what cognitive dissonance might be induced if they were aware that Homeopathy is a bona fide peer-reviewed journal!)

Note how the article doesn't even conceive of the possibility that pseudoscience might in fact be practiced by some branches of the official high-status academia, with peer review and all the other bureaucratic frills in place. Its authors clearly wouldn't be able to discuss meaningfully the question of how one could try to evaluate the reliability of the academic output in different areas and determine what sorts of pseudoscience might be thriving under prestigious academic titles and affiliations. On the contrary, all their examples are from low-status folkish superstitions and distant history. (Also, tellingly, the closest thing to a mainstream academic work that is included as an example of "pseudoscience" is The Bell Curve -- a book which was co-authored by a Harvard professor, but whose conclusions are ideologically unpalatable for the sort of people who write on RW.)

This is by no means the worst example -- for that, we'd need to look at articles about topics that have more direct political implications. But I think it does illustrate my points pretty well.

And by the way, what are "the intellectual institutions whose output inspires the RW writers"? I can tell you if they in fact inspired me, for example.

I think this should be clear from the above. What I have in mind is the mainstream academia and, in case of more immediate political topics, the left-centrist perspective of the mainstream media. (For the latter, a good litmus test is if you can imagine a given position being argued by a New York Times op-ed columnist.)

FWIW I largely agree with Vladimir_M that RW has a strong tendency to assume a broadly left-centrist political position. This happens also to be more or less my political position, so I'm fairly sure this isn't the result of political fanaticism on my part.

I'm not sure I'd describe it as "heavily ideological", for the rather boring reason that to me that suggests not only a definite political position but a fairly extreme political position, and being "broadly left-centrist" isn't that.

But, e.g., take a look at the page on David Cameron and tell me that it doesn't have a hefty dose of political spin on it. Again, I'm not saying this because my ox has been gored here; I agree with a lot of what the page says about him and would certainly never vote for him.

(No, that article isn't bronze-or-better. Only what, 10%?, of RW articles are bronze-or-better. The propositions "RW has a definite political slant" and "RW's bronze-or-better articles mostly do a good job of political neutrality" seem perfectly consistent to me.)