Yes, it does. It’s a commonplace idea here that politics is the mindkiller, and this is reasonable. It’s also reasonable to choose training which is difficult but possible, and politics and related subjects were probably too hard for LW in the past.
However, I think the group has become somewhat more capable in this area, and I think my judgement that my post was something that wouldn’t blow up was correct.
But on second thought my previous comment isn’t the reason why this otherwise neat example of a “click moment” hasn’t received more attention for its content. Considering that CharlieSheen’s (!) comment has been up voted to ~20, I think what’s produced a collective twitch of the LW community is that Angel Harris is just so far away from the quiet consensus that seems to have emerged on some educational matters and the near consensus on the intellectual validity of scepticism towards given explanations for the gap (a large minority basically endorses a hereditarian explanation, while (I speculate since there haven’t been polls on the matter due to signalling concerns) a major espouse agnosticism regarding what the given explanations being wrong entails).
He thus comes of as conspicuously wrong on some of the stuff written in his book and on the page you linked to. He’s not even wrong in a unpopular brave thinker kind of way, he’s just wrong in the standard way we keep running into and that probably bothers rationalists like a bad itch they can’t quite reach. I suspect someone bringing up a particularly lucid moment of instrumental rationality in one of Ratzinger’s theological writings that was followed by its application to immaculate conception would have received a similar response. Perhaps even slightly better, because we seem to now view religion as obviously silly and relatively cheap to reject for most fresh new rationalists on the site.
Perhaps we can together digg for more examples of this, to try and illustrate this point further and perhaps spark a productive debate (that I think the “click” moment deserves)? At the very least the high up vote (and probably a few downvotes) of the comment of the thread indicates lots of people have read this thread.
The group has. Politics is far less a mindkiller now than it was before, we can touch on nearly any subject with the exception of gender relations and have a pretty decent exercise in rationality.
Individuals who are just stumbling onto LW haven’t.
I don’t think either of you where considering the opportunity costs involved when making this comment. We do want to keep LW growing while maintaining its current quality don’t we? So much action has been taken to keep this so, from the HPMoR fanfiction, to the site redesign, to the newly written up introduction to rationality, to a more tolerant approach to religion (basically we still see it as a major rationality failure, but we’ve come to realize its just one of many equally potent rationality failures), ect.
Yes, it does. It’s a commonplace idea here that politics is the mindkiller, and this is reasonable. It’s also reasonable to choose training which is difficult but possible, and politics and related subjects were probably too hard for LW in the past.
However, I think the group has become somewhat more capable in this area, and I think my judgement that my post was something that wouldn’t blow up was correct.
But on second thought my previous comment isn’t the reason why this otherwise neat example of a “click moment” hasn’t received more attention for its content. Considering that CharlieSheen’s (!) comment has been up voted to ~20, I think what’s produced a collective twitch of the LW community is that Angel Harris is just so far away from the quiet consensus that seems to have emerged on some educational matters and the near consensus on the intellectual validity of scepticism towards given explanations for the gap (a large minority basically endorses a hereditarian explanation, while (I speculate since there haven’t been polls on the matter due to signalling concerns) a major espouse agnosticism regarding what the given explanations being wrong entails).
He thus comes of as conspicuously wrong on some of the stuff written in his book and on the page you linked to. He’s not even wrong in a unpopular brave thinker kind of way, he’s just wrong in the standard way we keep running into and that probably bothers rationalists like a bad itch they can’t quite reach. I suspect someone bringing up a particularly lucid moment of instrumental rationality in one of Ratzinger’s theological writings that was followed by its application to immaculate conception would have received a similar response. Perhaps even slightly better, because we seem to now view religion as obviously silly and relatively cheap to reject for most fresh new rationalists on the site.
Perhaps we can together digg for more examples of this, to try and illustrate this point further and perhaps spark a productive debate (that I think the “click” moment deserves)? At the very least the high up vote (and probably a few downvotes) of the comment of the thread indicates lots of people have read this thread.
The group has. Politics is far less a mindkiller now than it was before, we can touch on nearly any subject with the exception of gender relations and have a pretty decent exercise in rationality.
Individuals who are just stumbling onto LW haven’t.
I don’t think either of you where considering the opportunity costs involved when making this comment. We do want to keep LW growing while maintaining its current quality don’t we? So much action has been taken to keep this so, from the HPMoR fanfiction, to the site redesign, to the newly written up introduction to rationality, to a more tolerant approach to religion (basically we still see it as a major rationality failure, but we’ve come to realize its just one of many equally potent rationality failures), ect.