I know I’m not the first person to say this, but in case any of the moderators and people generally in charge are listening: as a peripheral member of Less Wrong at best, this is a significant factor in my reluctance to become further involved with the site and its community. When I come here and see extremely typical forum drama like the Will_Newsome debacle, it greatly reduces my confidence that this is a good place to learn rationality and find suitable role models for its practice.
I realise that’s an irrational judgment in many ways, but that’s sort of the point. I come here to learn to think rationally, I see poor behaviour from the people who are supposed to possess the fruits of that learning effort, and my gut instinct is to go away again (rather than learn the skills that would allow me to override that gut instinct and seek maximum benefit from Less Wrong in spite of its flaws).
This is reminding me of Heinlein’s “Gulf”, which describes intelligence/rationality training, and then testing it under stress.
There are also the teams in HPMOR.
However, (aside from that I’m citing fictional evidence) there may be an important difference between maintaining rationality under physical stress vs. maintaining rationality while sitting comfortably at a keyboard under social stress.
I know I’m not the first person to say this, but in case any of the moderators and people generally in charge are listening: as a peripheral member of Less Wrong at best, this is a significant factor in my reluctance to become further involved with the site and its community. When I come here and see extremely typical forum drama like the Will_Newsome debacle, it greatly reduces my confidence that this is a good place to learn rationality and find suitable role models for its practice.
I realise that’s an irrational judgment in many ways, but that’s sort of the point. I come here to learn to think rationally, I see poor behaviour from the people who are supposed to possess the fruits of that learning effort, and my gut instinct is to go away again (rather than learn the skills that would allow me to override that gut instinct and seek maximum benefit from Less Wrong in spite of its flaws).
This is reminding me of Heinlein’s “Gulf”, which describes intelligence/rationality training, and then testing it under stress.
There are also the teams in HPMOR.
However, (aside from that I’m citing fictional evidence) there may be an important difference between maintaining rationality under physical stress vs. maintaining rationality while sitting comfortably at a keyboard under social stress.