I find the use of the phrase “latest insights” to be a minor turn-off. It reminds me of [http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1](crappy news stories) over-hyping and misrepresenting individual papers in diet, health, psychology, and similar fields where individual papers are likely to be wrong, and more likely to be wrong the more remarkable their findings.
LessWrong is cognizant of the problems with scientific publishing, and we take a different approach towards discussing science than most blogs and mass media outlets do. We focus on higher-level summaries of the scientific knowledge in a field when discussing research, especially in psychology. I think we could convey the community’s goals better by dropping the word “latest”.
Should the front page include the phrase “latest insights”?
The front page claims
<blockquote>We use the latest insights from cognitive science, social psychology,probability theory, and decision theory to improve our understanding of how the world works and what we can do to achieve our goals.</blockquote>
I find the use of the phrase “latest insights” to be a minor turn-off. It reminds me of [http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1](crappy news stories) over-hyping and misrepresenting individual papers in diet, health, psychology, and similar fields where individual papers are likely to be wrong, and more likely to be wrong the more remarkable their findings.
LessWrong is cognizant of the problems with scientific publishing, and we take a different approach towards discussing science than most blogs and mass media outlets do. We focus on higher-level summaries of the scientific knowledge in a field when discussing research, especially in psychology. I think we could convey the community’s goals better by dropping the word “latest”.
This point seems to line up with [http://lesswrong.com/lw/atm/cult_impressions_of_less_wrongsi/6134](this comment) by Gabriel, but there was no further discussion there.