An explanation that struck me recently is that “rationality” memes have infected a much broader audience such that now people don’t all have to come to the LW watering hole to get their fix of sanity. Tim Ferriss references Kahneman in his podcast. “Heuristics and biases” is no longer a fringe thing that nobody is interested in. It’s also somewhat less weird to be Singulatarian, now that you can point to IBM’s Watson and self-driving cars and Kurzweil working at Google, whereas five years ago you just sounded crazy.
So, it’s not necessarily that LW is getting worse in any absolute sense, it’s just that the world is catching up. LW is just less special.
An explanation that struck me recently is that “rationality” memes have infected a much broader audience such that now people don’t all have to come to the LW watering hole to get their fix of sanity. Tim Ferriss references Kahneman in his podcast. “Heuristics and biases” is no longer a fringe thing that nobody is interested in. It’s also somewhat less weird to be Singulatarian, now that you can point to IBM’s Watson and self-driving cars and Kurzweil working at Google, whereas five years ago you just sounded crazy.
So, it’s not necessarily that LW is getting worse in any absolute sense, it’s just that the world is catching up. LW is just less special.