I’ve spent endless hours on message boards for [...] Slatestarcodex readers; neither of which ever really discuss [...] Scott Alexander’s writing, but rather, are just hubs for the types of oddballs who like [...] Slatestarcodex to talk about stuff that people with these personality traits like to talk about.
From the other side, this probably also explains why I don’t like the SSC/ACX related message boards.
ACX has much wider audience than LW, so “the kind of person who reads ACX” reduces to something like “an intelligent person who identifies as a contrarian and enjoys reading long texts”, which may be a group that happens to include me, but it also includes many people I prefer to avoid.
I like the fact that Scott writes about different topics, but the downside is that now neither of those topics works as a hard filter. For example, whenever Scott directly or indirectly mentions effective altruism, some people are going to write in the comments how the entire idea is stupid. (That irritates me a lot; even if I am not an EA myself, doesn’t mean that I am a fan of conspicuous talking smack about altruism in general.) So why do they keep reading the blog? Because there are also many articles on other interesting topics. So if you visit the message board, you will still find those people, but you won’t find Scott there to balance their negativity.
Offline ACX meetups are okay though. Apparently being able to walk away from the computer is a hard filter.
From the other side, this probably also explains why I don’t like the SSC/ACX related message boards.
ACX has much wider audience than LW, so “the kind of person who reads ACX” reduces to something like “an intelligent person who identifies as a contrarian and enjoys reading long texts”, which may be a group that happens to include me, but it also includes many people I prefer to avoid.
I like the fact that Scott writes about different topics, but the downside is that now neither of those topics works as a hard filter. For example, whenever Scott directly or indirectly mentions effective altruism, some people are going to write in the comments how the entire idea is stupid. (That irritates me a lot; even if I am not an EA myself, doesn’t mean that I am a fan of conspicuous talking smack about altruism in general.) So why do they keep reading the blog? Because there are also many articles on other interesting topics. So if you visit the message board, you will still find those people, but you won’t find Scott there to balance their negativity.
Offline ACX meetups are okay though. Apparently being able to walk away from the computer is a hard filter.