The thing is, most people on LW don’t disagree for any specific reason like respect or wanting to correct misconceptions or whatever. Disagreement just happens to be the status quo here. I haven’t worked out why people here like to disagree so much, even when there seems to be no benefit from doing so—but then again, humans aren’t perfectly instrumentally rational, and perhaps LWers are lessinstrumentally rational than most. (We certainly do seem to have more people suffering from akrasia around here than most places, after all.) It’s also possible that Lumifer and Vaniver are right, and that LW users are a conceited, contentious bunch that like to disagree to signal intelligence and/or gain karma. I know I’ve fallen victim to the urge to nitpick before, and so have many others here, including even prominent users like shminux. (Jiro, too, from my previous experience talking with him/her.) It’s just nitpicking. Respect, for better or for worse, doesn’t even really enter the equation.
For the record, however, I do respect your mathematical ability, and while I’m less confident about your metacognitive abilities, I think that if you’ve spent as much time pondering this subject as you claim—certainly a lot more time than most people around here have, probably—you have a reasonably good grasp on what you’re talking about. Just don’t expect most LWers to feel the same way.
The thing is, most people on LW don’t disagree for any specific reason like respect or wanting to correct misconceptions or whatever. Disagreement just happens to be the status quo here. I haven’t worked out why people here like to disagree so much, even when there seems to be no benefit from doing so—but then again, humans aren’t perfectly instrumentally rational, and perhaps LWers are less instrumentally rational than most. (We certainly do seem to have more people suffering from akrasia around here than most places, after all.) It’s also possible that Lumifer and Vaniver are right, and that LW users are a conceited, contentious bunch that like to disagree to signal intelligence and/or gain karma. I know I’ve fallen victim to the urge to nitpick before, and so have many others here, including even prominent users like shminux. (Jiro, too, from my previous experience talking with him/her.) It’s just nitpicking. Respect, for better or for worse, doesn’t even really enter the equation.
For the record, however, I do respect your mathematical ability, and while I’m less confident about your metacognitive abilities, I think that if you’ve spent as much time pondering this subject as you claim—certainly a lot more time than most people around here have, probably—you have a reasonably good grasp on what you’re talking about. Just don’t expect most LWers to feel the same way.