A possible example of failure to apply lessons from Less Wrong

People's Front of Judea Syndrome - when two neighboring groups regroup similar people and have similar goals, they'll start hating each other's guts, or at least say nasty things about each other.

Possible reasons:

• Disgruntled members leaving one group are likely to join the other group, biasing the flow of information.
• People feel the need to explain why there are two groups (joining being often politically delicate), and the cheapest explanation is "they're a bunch of wankers".
• Each group will see the other as a competitor, so members will signal group loyalty by badmouthing the other group.

Others?

I think about Inferential Distance a lot, and I still find it very hard to work around and find myself frequently hurt by underestimating it. Part of what you're talking about might just be that dealing with Inferential Distance is just Darn Hard.

The quoted section doesn't seem to claim that oldbies are going to other sites, and forgetting what they've learnt here; but rather that newbies@ are leaving and using lesswrong terminology; possibly without even fully understanding it.

@ (who haven't actually internalised many of the concepts yet)

Those links are awesome. The outside perspective is interesting and the pages within LW that they link to as "what the place is like" are also interesting.

A while back there was a discussion thread about what the "target audience" size for the Less Wrong sequences was. Specifically, how many people on the planet should one realistically expect to be familiar with the mindset here after fully productive PR saturation had occurred, given that lots of people are missing at least the time, inclination, ability, or interest to give us more than 20 seconds work of eyeball, if that.

I commented there (perhaps using too many references to an analogous model in physics) that the people who are likely candidates for LW's content are not likely to exist as independent atoms but in social networks where they're already connected to each other to some degree.

If you drew the social network with different colored nodes for people who were "not our audience", "ready", and "aware" then strict criteria imply that the ready and aware people probably form "islands of rationality in a sea of disinterest".

We should expect that some islands of people who are potentially interested in LW have already formed themselves into social clusters and built their own jargon and set of habits and such. In this case they may have less need for LW in the first place...

And yet...

I'm pretty sure that Aumann's theorem (to the effect that individual rationalists should generally not agree to disagree because they can take each other's beleifs as evidence) could be applied to groups as well, just by redrawing the boundaries of one's "agents" in the appropriate way. So I'm curious what it would look like for two rationalist groups to try update on the evidence that each has independently accumulated, until they are in agreement.

When I wrote the earlier comment, I didn't even know that the rationalwiki existed, but now that I know about them, and know that they know about LW (to the degree of having an article about LW at least) I'm wondering what it would like if LW consciously tried to Aumann update as a group on the surprising content that they have accumulated. Also, what would be the reaction from the editors of their wiki?