Are you really claiming that if one were to express deep disagreement with those among the Unitarians, the reactions would be equally dispassionate, upfront, and open to argument as they usually are when the prevailing opinion is challenged on LW?
The more I think about it, the more I find it difficult to answer this question. The main obstacle I’m running up against is that the two have very different communication styles, so the answer varies heavily depending on which communication style you’re seeking.
In my experiences, LessWrong is a very blunt, geeky approach to communication. It is also post-based, and thus neither real-time nor face-to-face. It’s very good at problem solving and science. People are likely to try and refute my stance, or treat it as a factual matter to be empirically tested.
Unitarian Universalist churches, by contrast, have been very polite and mainstream in their approach to communication. It’s also in-person, and real-time interaction. They’re very good at making people feel welcome and accepted. People are likely to simply accept that I happen to believe differently than them. People are likely to treat strong assertions as an article of faith, and therefore not particularly worth challenging.
I can’t really find a way to translate between these two, so I can’t really compare them.
Viewed through a mainstream, polite filter, I see LessWrong as a place that is actively hateful of religion, and extremely intolerant towards it, to the point of being willing to reject perfectly useful ideas simply because they happen to come from a religious organization.
Viewed through the blunt, geeky filter, I see UUs as blindly accepting and unwilling to actually challenge and dig in to an idea; I feel like I can have a very interesting discussion, but in many respects I’m a lot less likely to change someone’s mind (although, in other respects, I’d have a lot more luck using Dark Arts to manipulate a church-goer)
The more I think about it, the more I find it difficult to answer this question. The main obstacle I’m running up against is that the two have very different communication styles, so the answer varies heavily depending on which communication style you’re seeking.
In my experiences, LessWrong is a very blunt, geeky approach to communication. It is also post-based, and thus neither real-time nor face-to-face. It’s very good at problem solving and science. People are likely to try and refute my stance, or treat it as a factual matter to be empirically tested.
Unitarian Universalist churches, by contrast, have been very polite and mainstream in their approach to communication. It’s also in-person, and real-time interaction. They’re very good at making people feel welcome and accepted. People are likely to simply accept that I happen to believe differently than them. People are likely to treat strong assertions as an article of faith, and therefore not particularly worth challenging.
I can’t really find a way to translate between these two, so I can’t really compare them.
Viewed through a mainstream, polite filter, I see LessWrong as a place that is actively hateful of religion, and extremely intolerant towards it, to the point of being willing to reject perfectly useful ideas simply because they happen to come from a religious organization.
Viewed through the blunt, geeky filter, I see UUs as blindly accepting and unwilling to actually challenge and dig in to an idea; I feel like I can have a very interesting discussion, but in many respects I’m a lot less likely to change someone’s mind (although, in other respects, I’d have a lot more luck using Dark Arts to manipulate a church-goer)