[Link] Skeptics Stack Exchange
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/
“Beta Q&A site for skeptics, rationalists, free thinkers, or anyone who questions woo and pseudoscience. Skeptics is aimed at applied skepticism—researching specific areas of woo or pseudoscience. It is not for philosophical discussions about skepticism.”
It seems like it might of interest to folks here.
For those that don’t know, the Stack Exchange sites use a pretty successful Q&A format and (at least the sites I use so far) have a high signal-to-noise ratio. More info on how the Q&A system works is here.
I’m incredibly tempted to go in and ask “is it a good idea to sign up for cryonics?” just to see the ratio of discriminating vs undiscriminating skeptics, but I’m too easily Googleable wrt my position on the subject :-) No discussion of cryonics there at all so far AFAICT.
Edit: Done. Edit: and immediately closed. Anyone else want to try?
I tried it. Edit: looks like a couple of non-LW people have made thoughtful comments, one positive and one fairly neutral.
Thanks—look like you did better than me, nice work!
I’ve had a go at quick answer to maybe get a bit of discussion started (well, more detailed answers that aren’t quite as poor).
Well I find it funny that today, the highest voted answer is a reference to Hanson’s article on OB. Sort of feels like we got cheated. Or that there are no internet people interested in cryonics who don’t already know about LW and OB.
Do it, it’ll be interesting to watch :-)
I enjoy skeptics.stackexchange a bit, but only for occasional passing entertainment. It’s an occasionally enjoyable exercise in on-the-spot refutation of great silliness. If that isn’t your bag then you probably won’t enjoy it much.
I don’t actually see much crossover with LW at all.
Then do it by saying ‘I have my own opinion, but I’m curious what people here think.’
Phrasing it like that is likely to get closed as well, the Stack Exchange sites are strongly focused on Q&A, not discussions, so to avoid the question being closed you usually need to ask something that can have a ‘correct’ answer.
Well that was disappointing.
What a horrible occupation. :-)