I’m not generalizing from one example, and my reaction is not typical.
Point taken (and I think you meant atypical?). It’s funny, because I know Hugh and I know Alicorn, and I bet they’d make decent friends in person (if they haven’t met already at a Less Wrong meetup while I was on vacation or something). Anyway, your claim here seems way more reasonable than the dramatized ones above. (“I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act”.) It seems you have narrowed your argument specifically to relationship advice, in which case I’m much more tempted to agree that your point has merit. But I think her luminosity sequence got a lot of upvotes for a reason. I personally found some useful concepts in there, and looking at the comments it seems many others also discovered her ideas about luminosity to be useful. First, I don’t think shouting ‘hypocrisy’ is a good argument against the usefulness of a post; second, I don’t think that shouting ‘hypocrisy’, or attempting ad hominem attacks, is going to get you anywhere anyway. If you want to make people think Alicorn is a bad person, fine, but why the heck would you want to do that? Vengeance? It seems you take the more reasonable position that Alicorn might be being trusted as an expert where she lacks skill, but continuing to attack her in areas where skill has been demonstrated erodes Less Wrongers’ ability to believe you are acting in good faith.
Point taken (and I think you meant atypical?). It’s funny, because I know Hugh and I know Alicorn, and I bet they’d make decent friends in person (if they haven’t met already at a Less Wrong meetup while I was on vacation or something). Anyway, your claim here seems way more reasonable than the dramatized ones above. (“I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act”.) It seems you have narrowed your argument specifically to relationship advice, in which case I’m much more tempted to agree that your point has merit. But I think her luminosity sequence got a lot of upvotes for a reason. I personally found some useful concepts in there, and looking at the comments it seems many others also discovered her ideas about luminosity to be useful. First, I don’t think shouting ‘hypocrisy’ is a good argument against the usefulness of a post; second, I don’t think that shouting ‘hypocrisy’, or attempting ad hominem attacks, is going to get you anywhere anyway. If you want to make people think Alicorn is a bad person, fine, but why the heck would you want to do that? Vengeance? It seems you take the more reasonable position that Alicorn might be being trusted as an expert where she lacks skill, but continuing to attack her in areas where skill has been demonstrated erodes Less Wrongers’ ability to believe you are acting in good faith.