But one specific thing I already said I’m afraid of is that of LW becoming a “rational” community instead of a rational community, differing from other communities only by the flag it rallies around.
If you took a typical community and replaced its flag with one that said “be rational”, would you expect the effect to be positive, negative, and neutral?
You might think that a belief system which praised “reason” and “rationality” and “individualism” would have gained some kind of special immunity, somehow...?
Well, it didn’t.
It worked around as well as putting a sign saying “Cold” on a refrigerator that wasn’t plugged in.
If you took a typical community and replaced its flag with one that said “be rational”, would you expect the effect to be positive, negative, and neutral?
I don’t really know, but I’ll note that Scientologists are known to laud “sanity”, and Objectivists were all about “reason”.
Rationality flags don’t seem to help that much.
No, I wouldn’t.