I think one of my favorite things is to see someone earnestly defend a marginally valuable and slightly controversial theory on LW, because the resulting dynamics cause the good parts of the theory to be revealed while simultaneously producing an object lesson in identifying junk science and filtering poorly tested claims with reasonableness. Most of the regular commenters wouldn’t advocate or support a theory like NLP and if it was left to them the community wouldn’t produce conversation trees like this one, which I find quite educational.
I wish there was some natural way for me to use the voting system to express “Boo!” to the idea of LW becoming infested with normal NLP jargon and culture, but “Thanks!” for starting and sticking with a massive comment tree defending NLP. As there is no natural way to express this, I’m writing this comment and upvoting here and here explicitly :-)
Heh, you understood my intent perfectly. I’m pretty pig-headed on my own, but thanks for the encouragement :)
I propose that we create an open thread called “Fringe topics we should research for potential usefulness”. In this thread, the usual downvoting norms would be somewhat laxer.
I think one of my favorite things is to see someone earnestly defend a marginally valuable and slightly controversial theory on LW, because the resulting dynamics cause the good parts of the theory to be revealed while simultaneously producing an object lesson in identifying junk science and filtering poorly tested claims with reasonableness. Most of the regular commenters wouldn’t advocate or support a theory like NLP and if it was left to them the community wouldn’t produce conversation trees like this one, which I find quite educational.
I wish there was some natural way for me to use the voting system to express “Boo!” to the idea of LW becoming infested with normal NLP jargon and culture, but “Thanks!” for starting and sticking with a massive comment tree defending NLP. As there is no natural way to express this, I’m writing this comment and upvoting here and here explicitly :-)
Heh, you understood my intent perfectly. I’m pretty pig-headed on my own, but thanks for the encouragement :)
I propose that we create an open thread called “Fringe topics we should research for potential usefulness”. In this thread, the usual downvoting norms would be somewhat laxer.