Seems false for LessWrong 1.0, I’ve read much of the comments on the old Eliezer posts, and they are far far worse than the present forum. I have less to say on early LessWrong 2.0.
I know you said you don’t have a strong view on the actual history, but the actual history does seem pretty central to your argument here. You are free to choose some other argument for your conclusion however.
No—I really did just mean it as an example scenario, and you can plug in ‘x forum’ for ‘lw’. It was a mistake to use something in my example so close to the object level thing being discussed, but I think the argument ‘[forums founded by small communities] can benefit from selection effects that make them something other than gray spaces’ goes through.
I’m objecting to the ‘only ever’ in your initial statement as too strong.
Maybe SL4, Extropians, or something else is better here (like my former-favorite internet music space, llllllll.co, where all the senior members have now moved to Discord).
I think if I’d used a different example you’d be (rightly) dinging me for relevance rather than accuracy, but I really did mean to say the maybe-irrelevant thing and then reached too far for an existence proof (or not far enough, depending on how you see it).
Seems false for LessWrong 1.0, I’ve read much of the comments on the old Eliezer posts, and they are far far worse than the present forum. I have less to say on early LessWrong 2.0.
I know you said you don’t have a strong view on the actual history, but the actual history does seem pretty central to your argument here. You are free to choose some other argument for your conclusion however.
No—I really did just mean it as an example scenario, and you can plug in ‘x forum’ for ‘lw’. It was a mistake to use something in my example so close to the object level thing being discussed, but I think the argument ‘[forums founded by small communities] can benefit from selection effects that make them something other than gray spaces’ goes through.
I’m objecting to the ‘only ever’ in your initial statement as too strong.
Maybe SL4, Extropians, or something else is better here (like my former-favorite internet music space, llllllll.co, where all the senior members have now moved to Discord).
I think if I’d used a different example you’d be (rightly) dinging me for relevance rather than accuracy, but I really did mean to say the maybe-irrelevant thing and then reached too far for an existence proof (or not far enough, depending on how you see it).
I agree that if nobody knows about your forum other than the black-belts, then your forum will be black-belt quality.