The one I have in mind is this. This post and its comment thread, combined with the final net results of voting, in my opinion decisively refute the idea of any universally applicable “sanity waterline” that is supposedly higher on LW than elsewhere. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the collective failure of rational thinking demonstrated there was so severe that it might as well have been a happy and approving discussion of horoscopes, healing crystals, or the Mayan 2012 doomsday.
It is the prospect of such things starting to re-emerge on a regular and frequent basis that has motivated my reactions in this thread.
No, I wouldn’t say the group is representative, although on the other hand, it’s certainly not just a small fringe group either.
However, I don’t have in mind just people who actively contribute to such nonsense. Another problem is that similar intellectual failures about other topics would be (for the most part) correctly identified and criticized without causing bitter controversy and discourse breakdown, and a mass of other readers would also express correct judgment at least with upvotes and downvotes. So even the general passive approval is, in my opinion, indicative of bias, since such passive approval would certainly not be given to various other things that are not significantly worse by any reasonable standards.
Another bias that’s clearly visible is that when someone displays intellectual failures of similar magnitude in various other areas, this would be taken on LW as indicative of an irrational person who is altogether below the universal standards of rational thinking practiced here—whereas nothing similar occurs when it comes to these topics. Of course, I don’t think people should be written off as general intellectual failures just because they demonstrated irrationality about these topics, but it definitely should serve as a warning for those who sometimes do apply such standards in other situations.
Which one was that? (Vague recollection of having seen that, and maybe even commented, but can’t recall the exact thread right now.)
The one I have in mind is this. This post and its comment thread, combined with the final net results of voting, in my opinion decisively refute the idea of any universally applicable “sanity waterline” that is supposedly higher on LW than elsewhere. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the collective failure of rational thinking demonstrated there was so severe that it might as well have been a happy and approving discussion of horoscopes, healing crystals, or the Mayan 2012 doomsday.
It is the prospect of such things starting to re-emerge on a regular and frequent basis that has motivated my reactions in this thread.
Is the group reading and responding to these relationship posts representative of Less Wrong? I just skip over them.
No, I wouldn’t say the group is representative, although on the other hand, it’s certainly not just a small fringe group either.
However, I don’t have in mind just people who actively contribute to such nonsense. Another problem is that similar intellectual failures about other topics would be (for the most part) correctly identified and criticized without causing bitter controversy and discourse breakdown, and a mass of other readers would also express correct judgment at least with upvotes and downvotes. So even the general passive approval is, in my opinion, indicative of bias, since such passive approval would certainly not be given to various other things that are not significantly worse by any reasonable standards.
Another bias that’s clearly visible is that when someone displays intellectual failures of similar magnitude in various other areas, this would be taken on LW as indicative of an irrational person who is altogether below the universal standards of rational thinking practiced here—whereas nothing similar occurs when it comes to these topics. Of course, I don’t think people should be written off as general intellectual failures just because they demonstrated irrationality about these topics, but it definitely should serve as a warning for those who sometimes do apply such standards in other situations.