I agree (as a comparative outsider) that the polite response to Holden is excellent. Many (most?) communities—both online communities and real-world organisations, especially long-standing ones—are not good at it for lots of reasons, and I think the measured response of evaluating and promoting Holden’s post is exactly what LessWrong members would hope LessWrong could do, and they showed it succeeded.
I agree that this is good evidence that LessWrong isn’t just an Eliezer-cult. (The true test would be if Elizier and another long-standing poster were dismissive to the post, and then other people persuaded them otherwise. In fact, maybe people should roleplay that or something, just to avoid getting stuck in an argument-from-authority trap, but that’s a silly idea. Either way, the fact that other people spoke positively, and Elizier and other long-standing posters did too, is a good thing.)
However, I’m not sure it’s as uniquely a victory for the rationality of LessWrong as it sounds. In responose to srdiamond, Luke quoted tenlier saying “[Holden’s] critique mostly consists of points that are pretty persistently bubbling beneath the surface around here, and get brought up quite a bit. Don’t most people regard this as a great summary of their current views, rather than persuasive in any way?” To me, that suggests that Holden did a really excellent job expressing these views clearly and persuasively. However, it suggests that previous people had tried to express something similar, but it hadn’t been expressed well enough to be widely accepted, and people reading had failed to sufficiently apply the dictum of “fix your opponents’ arguments for them”. I’m not sure if that’s true (it’s certainly not automatically true), but I suspect it might be. What do people think?
If there’s any truth to it, it suggests one good answer to the recent post http://lesswrong.com/lw/btc/how_can_we_get_more_and_better_lw_contrarians (whether that was desirable in general or not) would be, as a rationalist exercise for someone familiar with/to the community and good at writing rationally, to take a survey of contrarian views on the topic that people on the community may have had but not been able to express, and don’t worry about showmanship like pretending to believe it yourself, but just say “I think what some people think is [well-expressed argument]. Do you agree that’s fair? If so, do I and other people think they have a point?” Whether or not that argument is right it’s still good to engage with it if many people are thinking it.
I agree (as a comparative outsider) that the polite response to Holden is excellent. Many (most?) communities—both online communities and real-world organisations, especially long-standing ones—are not good at it for lots of reasons, and I think the measured response of evaluating and promoting Holden’s post is exactly what LessWrong members would hope LessWrong could do, and they showed it succeeded.
I agree that this is good evidence that LessWrong isn’t just an Eliezer-cult. (The true test would be if Elizier and another long-standing poster were dismissive to the post, and then other people persuaded them otherwise. In fact, maybe people should roleplay that or something, just to avoid getting stuck in an argument-from-authority trap, but that’s a silly idea. Either way, the fact that other people spoke positively, and Elizier and other long-standing posters did too, is a good thing.)
However, I’m not sure it’s as uniquely a victory for the rationality of LessWrong as it sounds. In responose to srdiamond, Luke quoted tenlier saying “[Holden’s] critique mostly consists of points that are pretty persistently bubbling beneath the surface around here, and get brought up quite a bit. Don’t most people regard this as a great summary of their current views, rather than persuasive in any way?” To me, that suggests that Holden did a really excellent job expressing these views clearly and persuasively. However, it suggests that previous people had tried to express something similar, but it hadn’t been expressed well enough to be widely accepted, and people reading had failed to sufficiently apply the dictum of “fix your opponents’ arguments for them”. I’m not sure if that’s true (it’s certainly not automatically true), but I suspect it might be. What do people think?
If there’s any truth to it, it suggests one good answer to the recent post http://lesswrong.com/lw/btc/how_can_we_get_more_and_better_lw_contrarians (whether that was desirable in general or not) would be, as a rationalist exercise for someone familiar with/to the community and good at writing rationally, to take a survey of contrarian views on the topic that people on the community may have had but not been able to express, and don’t worry about showmanship like pretending to believe it yourself, but just say “I think what some people think is [well-expressed argument]. Do you agree that’s fair? If so, do I and other people think they have a point?” Whether or not that argument is right it’s still good to engage with it if many people are thinking it.