I agree with your interpretation of the name LessWrong. Except that I don’t think there’s a subtle secondary message. The straightforward interpretation is probably correct and I don’t think looking for a deeper meaning is going lead to extra insight.
I’m pretty confident that the majority of contributors on LessWrong feel that they’re more logical and more consistent thinkers than their peers and that sense of superiority shows in a multitude of ways. This triggers the defensive “if you’re so smart, why are you wrong about X?” line. Because the name of the site happens to be LessWrong the obvious “pun” is made and the statement takes the form “for a site named LessWrong you sure are wrong about...”. It’s just an attempt to be clever.
You can see the same effect very clearly with movie reviews. They all start or finish with a not-so-clever play on the movie’s title.
Except that I don’t think there’s a subtle secondary message. The straightforward interpretation is probably correct and I don’t think looking for a deeper meaning is going lead to extra insight.
I agree with this. (Your use of “except” confuses me by making it seem as if you think I thought the opposite of those two sentences. Edit: This jumped out as important because the difference between stating beliefs about optimal decision policy and stating beliefs about what decision policies others are engaging in is a big difference.)
I agree with your interpretation of the name LessWrong. Except that I don’t think there’s a subtle secondary message. The straightforward interpretation is probably correct and I don’t think looking for a deeper meaning is going lead to extra insight.
I’m pretty confident that the majority of contributors on LessWrong feel that they’re more logical and more consistent thinkers than their peers and that sense of superiority shows in a multitude of ways. This triggers the defensive “if you’re so smart, why are you wrong about X?” line. Because the name of the site happens to be LessWrong the obvious “pun” is made and the statement takes the form “for a site named LessWrong you sure are wrong about...”. It’s just an attempt to be clever.
You can see the same effect very clearly with movie reviews. They all start or finish with a not-so-clever play on the movie’s title.
I agree with this. (Your use of “except” confuses me by making it seem as if you think I thought the opposite of those two sentences. Edit: This jumped out as important because the difference between stating beliefs about optimal decision policy and stating beliefs about what decision policies others are engaging in is a big difference.)