That this can be a place where people will actually put forth the effort to get the basic everywhere everyday flawed human communication bugs out of the picture, and do deliberate and intentional communication and collaborative truth seeking on a meaningfully higher level. … Everything Scott said in that post rings true to me about people and populations in general. But the hope is that LessWrong is not just humans doing business as usual. The hope is that LessWrong is actually different.
Look, I hate to break the news to you, but just like Soylent Green, Less Wrong is people! Your goals and aspirations are extremely worthwhile and I entirely agree with them, but to whatever extent they succeed, it will NOT be because “LessWrong is not just humans doing business as usual”! Rather, it will be bdcause the very definition of “business as usual”—and, crucially, “politics as usual”! - will have been successfully modified and perfected to make it more in line with both human values (humaneness) as they actually exist out there, in the real world, and a general norm of truth seeking and deliberation (which is however, i claim, not a sufficient condition to achieving this goal, other ‘norms of engagement’ being just as important). This is what it actually means to “raise the sanity waterline”! Making us less human and perhaps more Clippy-like (that is, with the entirety of accepted discourse being “Hey, it looks like you might be having problem X! Would you like me to use advanced Bayesian inference techniques to help you assess this problem and provide you with a helpful, canned solution to it? [OK]/[CANCEL]”) is not a sensible or feasible goal, and it is indeed somewhat puzzling that you as a CFAR instructor yourself do not immediately notice and engage with this important point.
Look, I hate to break the news to you, but just like Soylent Green, Less Wrong is people! Your goals and aspirations are extremely worthwhile and I entirely agree with them, but to whatever extent they succeed, it will NOT be because “LessWrong is not just humans doing business as usual”! Rather, it will be bdcause the very definition of “business as usual”—and, crucially, “politics as usual”! - will have been successfully modified and perfected to make it more in line with both human values (humaneness) as they actually exist out there, in the real world, and a general norm of truth seeking and deliberation (which is however, i claim, not a sufficient condition to achieving this goal, other ‘norms of engagement’ being just as important). This is what it actually means to “raise the sanity waterline”! Making us less human and perhaps more Clippy-like (that is, with the entirety of accepted discourse being “Hey, it looks like you might be having problem X! Would you like me to use advanced Bayesian inference techniques to help you assess this problem and provide you with a helpful, canned solution to it? [OK]/[CANCEL]”) is not a sensible or feasible goal, and it is indeed somewhat puzzling that you as a CFAR instructor yourself do not immediately notice and engage with this important point.