Whenever I’ve been coming across someone who I perceive as both highly intelligent and biased, I’ve been sending them here. It took me until today to realize that this might be an awful sort of recruiting strategy for the website.
Do the pros outweigh the cons, is sending intelligent yet biased people here a good idea?
It’s a good idea if they actually want to learn more about rationality, and a better idea if they have enough patience to hang around LW long enough to learn anything.
It might be a better idea if you referred them to specific articles; if their free time is limited, “start with the sequences” is frustrating advice.
It feels to me like we can weather it. I’d be more worried about your referrals learning all about biases and only using their knowledge to spot biases in others, as EY describes here, but even this risk doesn’t seem that large to me—I’ve only seen like 1-2 LWers do something resembling this, ever.
Whenever I’ve been coming across someone who I perceive as both highly intelligent and biased, I’ve been sending them here. It took me until today to realize that this might be an awful sort of recruiting strategy for the website.
Do the pros outweigh the cons, is sending intelligent yet biased people here a good idea?
It’s a good idea if they actually want to learn more about rationality, and a better idea if they have enough patience to hang around LW long enough to learn anything.
It might be a better idea if you referred them to specific articles; if their free time is limited, “start with the sequences” is frustrating advice.
Poll: What should newcomers be pointed to on the about page?
[pollid:208]
It feels to me like we can weather it. I’d be more worried about your referrals learning all about biases and only using their knowledge to spot biases in others, as EY describes here, but even this risk doesn’t seem that large to me—I’ve only seen like 1-2 LWers do something resembling this, ever.
how many of those people have gone on to troll us or be terrible influences?
No clue.