The money or lack thereof doesn’t matter, since RW is obviously not an implementation of Villam’s proposed strategy: it fails on the ugliness with its stock MediaWiki appearance, has too broad a remit, and like El Reg it shoots itself in the foot with its oh-so-hilarious-not! sense of humor (I dislike reading it even on pages completely unrelated to LW). It may be successful in its niche, but its niche is essentially the same niche as /r/atheism or Richard Dawkins—mockery of the enemy leavened with some facts and references.
If—purely hypothetically speaking here, of course—one wished to discredit LW by making the respective RW article as negative as possible, I would expect it to do real damage. But not be any sort of fatal takedown that set a mainstream tone or gave a general population its marching orders, along the lines of Shermer’s ‘cryonics is a scam because frozen strawberries’ or Gould’s Mismeasure of Man’s ‘IQ is racist, involved researchers like Merton faked the data because they are racist, and it caused the Holocaust too’.
The money or lack thereof doesn’t matter, since RW is obviously not an implementation of Villam’s proposed strategy: it fails on the ugliness with its stock MediaWiki appearance, has too broad a remit, and like El Reg it shoots itself in the foot with its oh-so-hilarious-not! sense of humor (I dislike reading it even on pages completely unrelated to LW). It may be successful in its niche, but its niche is essentially the same niche as /r/atheism or Richard Dawkins—mockery of the enemy leavened with some facts and references.
If—purely hypothetically speaking here, of course—one wished to discredit LW by making the respective RW article as negative as possible, I would expect it to do real damage. But not be any sort of fatal takedown that set a mainstream tone or gave a general population its marching orders, along the lines of Shermer’s ‘cryonics is a scam because frozen strawberries’ or Gould’s Mismeasure of Man’s ‘IQ is racist, involved researchers like Merton faked the data because they are racist, and it caused the Holocaust too’.