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Comment by ShortName on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute · 2012-03-26T17:32:03.586Z · LW · GW

Long time lurker, I think LW is not capable enough as a social unit to handle it's topic and I currently view that participating in LW is not a good way to efficiently drive it's goals.

In order to reach a (hostile) audience one needs to speak the language. However ambient ways of carrying out discussion are often intermingling status / identity / politics with epistemology. In order to forward a position that biased / faith / economy based thinking are not epistemologically efficient tools one needs to make at least the initial steps in this twisted up "insane troll logic" . The end product is to reject the premise the whole argument stands on but it will never be produced if the thinking doesn't get started. In making it public and praising this kind of transitioning of modes of thinking, a lot of the machinery temporarily required to play the drama out gets reinforced into a kind of bedrock. It complicates matters people are simultaneously in need of completing a particular step while others need to dispel them. Thus there is a tendency to fixate on a "development step" relevant to the majority and becoming hostile to everything else.

I don't see the need to profess stances on things if the relevant anticipations work correctly. Coding the keys of insights on a single namespace and honing them to work against a static context makes applying and discussing them in other contexts needlessly complex. If someone knows a bias / heuristic / concept by some other name and that makes a LW participant not recognize or fail to apply things that they have learnt the password for, LW has managed to isolate insights from their usual and most needed application area.

Things that "hardcore" pursuits find valuable are passed "as is" or "as finalized by AwesomeDude42". This is faith based "cause they say so". Hooked by the "quality of the merchandise" this communal activity is more of a distribution system of those closed packages of tools rather than an epistemic engine in it's own right. I think that even school should be a place of learning rather than a place to receive data about what others have learned.

Because there is a caliber difference not all members can follow or participate in the production of the "good stuff" they wait to be distributed right out of the oven. Doing a passive "level up" handbook in the form of sequences still leaves a big "you must be this tall to participate in this facet of this community". There is no escaping the cognitive work of the individual but LW functions more as a price rather than the workbench.

The activity of LW is limited in a content-independent way by social structure in areas that it wishes to be more. This is not the optimal venue of thinking, but that shouldn't come as a big surprise.