My two cents. There’s a certain kind of posts on LW that to me feel almost painfully anti-rational. I don’t want to name names, but such posts often get highly upvoted. Said was one of very few people willing to vocally disagree with such posts. As such, he was a voice for a larger and less vocal set of people, including me. Essentially, from now on it will be harder to disagree with bullshit on LW—because the example is gone, and you know that if you disagree too hard, you might become another example. So I’m not happy to see him kicked out, at all.
My thoughts are similar to yours although I’m more willing to tolerate posts that you call “almost painfully anti-rational” (while still wishing Said was around to push back hard on them). I think in the early stages of genuine intellectual progress, it may be hard to distinguish real progress from “bullshit”. I would say that people (e.g. authors of such posts) are overly confident about their own favorite ideas, rather than that the posts are clearly bullshit and should not have appeared. My sense is that it would be a bad idea to get rid of such overconfidence completely because intellectual progress is a public good and it would be harder to motivate people to work on some approach if they weren’t irrationally optimistic about it, but equally bad or worse if there was little harsh or sustained criticism to make clear that at least some people think there are serious problems with their ideas.
FWIW my personal intention—only time will tell whether I actually stick to it—is to be a little more vigorous in disagreeing with things that I think likely to be anti-rational, precisely because Said will no longer be doing it.
(Just a brief note that I accidentally left a thumbs-down react on this comment of gjm’s for some period in the last hour. I had no intention to, I like/support gjm’s intention, I have been working on the reacts code lately so that probably led me to accidentally leave one on the live site.)
My two cents. There’s a certain kind of posts on LW that to me feel almost painfully anti-rational. I don’t want to name names, but such posts often get highly upvoted. Said was one of very few people willing to vocally disagree with such posts. As such, he was a voice for a larger and less vocal set of people, including me. Essentially, from now on it will be harder to disagree with bullshit on LW—because the example is gone, and you know that if you disagree too hard, you might become another example. So I’m not happy to see him kicked out, at all.
My thoughts are similar to yours although I’m more willing to tolerate posts that you call “almost painfully anti-rational” (while still wishing Said was around to push back hard on them). I think in the early stages of genuine intellectual progress, it may be hard to distinguish real progress from “bullshit”. I would say that people (e.g. authors of such posts) are overly confident about their own favorite ideas, rather than that the posts are clearly bullshit and should not have appeared. My sense is that it would be a bad idea to get rid of such overconfidence completely because intellectual progress is a public good and it would be harder to motivate people to work on some approach if they weren’t irrationally optimistic about it, but equally bad or worse if there was little harsh or sustained criticism to make clear that at least some people think there are serious problems with their ideas.
FWIW my personal intention—only time will tell whether I actually stick to it—is to be a little more vigorous in disagreeing with things that I think likely to be anti-rational, precisely because Said will no longer be doing it.
(Just a brief note that I accidentally left a thumbs-down react on this comment of gjm’s for some period in the last hour. I had no intention to, I like/support gjm’s intention, I have been working on the reacts code lately so that probably led me to accidentally leave one on the live site.)