My experience suggests an analogy or continuum? As RationalWiki is to LW, so LW is to so-called post-rationalists.
RationalWiki is highly mission driven, centralized around orthodox summaries on various topics, and not really a conversation at all. Relatively speaking, RW is the most obsessed with purifying ambient culture while sticking to the rituals of peer review (or whatever NSF or NIH insists on for grant funding lately), and are the least confident in their ability to have original thoughts about hard things.
So-called post-rats are full of opinions and aren’t particularly interested cargo cult practices around citation and seriousness and wikis and so forth. If you can’t judge things yourself, you’re probably not in the audience. If weird surfaces scares some of the audience away, there are fewer worries about someone dumb being mislead by a joke. They tend to be professional ML people and/or have read a pile of history books and love a good mind quake. Books and conversation and trolling are essential. Also maybe instead of aspiring to be better at reasoning they aspire to be more normal?
Modern LW is sort of in the middle. It has a wiki, wants to save the world, and prefers posts to be like a journal article with citations… but it also thinks that solid reasoning is more essential than “science” and fan fiction isn’t such a bad way to get out a message without dealing with the downsides of respectability ;-)
My experience suggests an analogy or continuum? As RationalWiki is to LW, so LW is to so-called post-rationalists.
RationalWiki is highly mission driven, centralized around orthodox summaries on various topics, and not really a conversation at all. Relatively speaking, RW is the most obsessed with purifying ambient culture while sticking to the rituals of peer review (or whatever NSF or NIH insists on for grant funding lately), and are the least confident in their ability to have original thoughts about hard things.
So-called post-rats are full of opinions and aren’t particularly interested cargo cult practices around citation and seriousness and wikis and so forth. If you can’t judge things yourself, you’re probably not in the audience. If weird surfaces scares some of the audience away, there are fewer worries about someone dumb being mislead by a joke. They tend to be professional ML people and/or have read a pile of history books and love a good mind quake. Books and conversation and trolling are essential. Also maybe instead of aspiring to be better at reasoning they aspire to be more normal?
Modern LW is sort of in the middle. It has a wiki, wants to save the world, and prefers posts to be like a journal article with citations… but it also thinks that solid reasoning is more essential than “science” and fan fiction isn’t such a bad way to get out a message without dealing with the downsides of respectability ;-)