What’s bad about cults is not that they’re weird. It’s that they motivate people to do bad things...
People use “weird” as a heuristic for danger, and personally I don’t blame them, because they have good Bayesian reasons for it. Breaking a social norm X is positively correlated with breaking a social norm Y, and the correlation is strong enough for most people to notice.
The right thing to do is to show enough social skill to avoid triggering the weirdness alarm signal. (Just like publishing in serious media is the right thing to avoid the “pseudoscience” label.) You cannot expect that outsiders will do an exception for LW, suspend their heuristics and explore the website deeply; that would be asking them to privilege a hypothesis.
If something is “weird”, we should try to make it less weird. No excuses.
People use “weird” as a heuristic for danger, and personally I don’t blame them, because they have good Bayesian reasons for it. Breaking a social norm X is positively correlated with breaking a social norm Y, and the correlation is strong enough for most people to notice.
The right thing to do is to show enough social skill to avoid triggering the weirdness alarm signal. (Just like publishing in serious media is the right thing to avoid the “pseudoscience” label.) You cannot expect that outsiders will do an exception for LW, suspend their heuristics and explore the website deeply; that would be asking them to privilege a hypothesis.
If something is “weird”, we should try to make it less weird. No excuses.
So we should be Less Weird now? ;)
We should be winning.
Less Weird is a good heuristic for winning (though a bad heuristic for a site name ).