People tell me SI is arrogant but I don’t see it myself.
When you tell someone something and open it up to falsification and criticism I no longer see it as arrogance ( but I am wrong there for some reason)
In any case, what annoys me about the claims made is that its mostly based on anecdotal evidence and very little has come from research. Also as a regular guy and not a scientist or engineer I’ve noticed a distinct lack of any discussion of SI’s viewpoints in the news.
I don’t see anyone actively trying to falsify any of the claims in the sequences for example, and I think it’s because you cannot really take them all that seriously.
A second problem is that there are many typos, little mistakes and (due to new experimental evidence) wrong things in the sequences and they never get updated.
I’d rather see the sequences as part of a continually updated wiki-like lesson plan, where feedback is reviewed by a kind of board and they change what the texts accordingly.
The nitpicks mentioned on rationalwiki also contribute to the feeling of cultishness and arrogance:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong
The part about quantum mechanics could use some extra posts, especially since EY does explain why he makes the claim when you take the whole of the sequences into account. He uses evidence from unrelated fields to prove many worlds.
EDIT: for some unknown reason people are downvoting my comment, if you downvote(d) this post or see why please tell me why so I can learn and improve future posts. Private messages are ok if you don’t want to do it through a response here.
Apostrophes are not used to form plurals. (Some style guides give some
exceptions,
but this is not one of them.)
The plural of “typo” is “typos”. “Typo’s” is a word, but it’s the possesive
form of “typo” (so it’s not the word you want here).
Exception: Use apostrophes with capital letters [sic—the first example uses a
lowercase letter] and numbers when the meaning would be unclear otherwise.
Use an apostrophe plus -s to form the plurals of letters, numbers, and
words named as words.
That sentence has too many but’s.
Remember to dot your i’s and cross your t’s, or your readers may not be
able to distinguish them from e’s and l’s.
At the end of each chapter the author had mysteriously written two 3′s and
two &’s.
[...]
Exception: References to the years in a decade are not underlined
[italicized] and often omit the apostrophe. Thus either 1960′s or 1960s is
acceptable as long as usage is consistent.
Correct or not, the style guide is lame. A clearly superior way to prevent the ambiguity with unfortunate clear default is to use single quotes on both side of the ‘i’. So ’i’s, not i’s.
People tell me SI is arrogant but I don’t see it myself. When you tell someone something and open it up to falsification and criticism I no longer see it as arrogance ( but I am wrong there for some reason)
In any case, what annoys me about the claims made is that its mostly based on anecdotal evidence and very little has come from research. Also as a regular guy and not a scientist or engineer I’ve noticed a distinct lack of any discussion of SI’s viewpoints in the news.
I don’t see anyone actively trying to falsify any of the claims in the sequences for example, and I think it’s because you cannot really take them all that seriously.
A second problem is that there are many typos, little mistakes and (due to new experimental evidence) wrong things in the sequences and they never get updated. I’d rather see the sequences as part of a continually updated wiki-like lesson plan, where feedback is reviewed by a kind of board and they change what the texts accordingly.
The nitpicks mentioned on rationalwiki also contribute to the feeling of cultishness and arrogance:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong The part about quantum mechanics could use some extra posts, especially since EY does explain why he makes the claim when you take the whole of the sequences into account. He uses evidence from unrelated fields to prove many worlds.
EDIT: for some unknown reason people are downvoting my comment, if you downvote(d) this post or see why please tell me why so I can learn and improve future posts. Private messages are ok if you don’t want to do it through a response here.
Murphy’s law: a sentence criticising typos will contain a typo itself.
Thanks, google docs is not flagging any typos, could you point some out for me?
Apostrophes are not used to form plurals. (Some style guides give some exceptions, but this is not one of them.) The plural of “typo” is “typos”. “Typo’s” is a word, but it’s the possesive form of “typo” (so it’s not the word you want here).
(Ninja edit: better link.)
Thanks that helped. Too bad the spellchecker missed it.
In what circumstances we use ’s to form a plural? The link doesn’t appear to suggest any.
Rule 11:
If you were looking at the link I posted before editing my comment, search for “tired” and “DO use the apostrophe to form the plural”.
My 1992 Little, Brown Handbook says:
Correct or not, the style guide is lame. A clearly superior way to prevent the ambiguity with unfortunate clear default is to use single quotes on both side of the ‘i’. So ’i’s, not i’s.
I’ve missed that, thanks.