Many years ago I lurked on LessWrong, making a very occasional comment but finding the ideas and discussion fascinating and appealing. I believe I am not as smart as the average commenter here, and I am certainly less formally educated. I eventually drifted away to follow other of my interests and did not put in the work to learn enough to feel like I could contribute meaningfully. I specifically recall Said Achmiz as being a commenter I was afraid of and did not want to engage with. I didn’t leave entirely because of Said, it was more about the effort of learning all the concepts, but maybe 1⁄8 of my decision was based on him. I imagine his attitude towards this will be, if I’m too much of a coward to risk an unknown internet commenter saying possibly bad things about my own comments, then I really don’t belong here anyway. Which, maybe it’s true. I don’t know if I will try again in the upcoming 3 years, but I’m more likely to than before Said was banned.
Context: I much more recently gravitated to the Duncansphere, as it were, and am kinda on the fringes of that these days (I missed the Duncan/Said thing, and only know about it from comments on this post). I was encouraged there to come here and post this anecdote.
Data point. I was born in 1968 and I got a lot more averse to phone calls as email and texting got better. My reasons are visual cues and taking my time to think (as Wedge said), as well as certain kinds of phone calls having become much worse. The call to a large business where one can expect a phone tree has become far far worse than when one could expect a human to pick up. During the earlier years of cell phones, and again when digital audio started out, the call quality was frequently so bad that it was another significant push away from a phone call even to a friend. Finally, a phone call these days socially seems like more of an interruption, a demand, than an asynchronous communication.