How commonly are arguments on LessWrong aimed at specific users? Sometimes, certainly. But it seems the rule, rather than the exception, that articles here dissect commonly encountered lines of thought, absent any attribution. Are they targeting “someone not in the room”? Do we need to put a face to every position?
By the by, “They’re making cognitive errors” is an insultingly reductive way to characterize, for instance, the examination of value hierarchies and how awareness of them vs unawareness influence both our reasoning and appraisal of our fellow man’s morals.
The majority of such complaints that do well on LW are in reference to users or discussions on LW or related groups. Not always a specific individual, but often a specific set of posts or comment patterns. There are exceptions, where someone complains about some ideas in oped or twitter, but those tend to get downvoted unless they’re truly pervasive.
And even so, if they’re not steelmanning the opposition, or pointing out some interesting pattern or reasoning for the disagreement, they tend to do poorly here.
How commonly are arguments on LessWrong aimed at specific users? Sometimes, certainly. But it seems the rule, rather than the exception, that articles here dissect commonly encountered lines of thought, absent any attribution. Are they targeting “someone not in the room”? Do we need to put a face to every position?
By the by, “They’re making cognitive errors” is an insultingly reductive way to characterize, for instance, the examination of value hierarchies and how awareness of them vs unawareness influence both our reasoning and appraisal of our fellow man’s morals.
The majority of such complaints that do well on LW are in reference to users or discussions on LW or related groups. Not always a specific individual, but often a specific set of posts or comment patterns. There are exceptions, where someone complains about some ideas in oped or twitter, but those tend to get downvoted unless they’re truly pervasive.
And even so, if they’re not steelmanning the opposition, or pointing out some interesting pattern or reasoning for the disagreement, they tend to do poorly here.
A conspiracy theory about Jeffrey Epstein has 264 votes currently: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hurF9uFGkJYXzpHEE/a-non-magical-explanation-of-jeffrey-epstein