If anything, not being able / advised to discuss any of the above topics reflects significantly less rationality than the average person, perhaps somewhere between children and autists.
I would strongly disagree with that statement; both in your depiction of LessWrong and your depiction of autistics. I think if you made a list of all the things other communities avoid; many of theirs would be much, much longer. I would say it would contain many of the same items on the above list. I myself find graphic depictions of violence very disturbing. It deeply troubles me that so many people enjoy watching it. I’m not sure what limits this places on my rationality. I can still discuss violence in the abstract, but avoid discussing it in the concrete. But most internet communities would frown upon graphic depictions of violence too. LessWrong tends to have a lot of abstract discussions and only a few concrete discussions. This is typical of many internet forum discussions; not just exclusive to LessWrong. My guess is this is a much greater cause of bias than limits on what type of concrete discussions can come up.
I would be less opposed to graphic depictions of sex, but I would certainly never begin including it on here because I know many would find it offensive. I also believe it would lead to a deterioration of the quality of forum posts. I am not sure what limits this places on others’ rationality either; this strikes me as more of a personal choice.
A more biased but likely proposition would be that the failure to handle banal conversation topics like pop culture or humour casts doubt on the truth or intellectual value of the things such a crowd does accept to discuss, and professes expertise about.
As I said, I’m least certain about how pop culture and art discussions would be received. My guess is this would be okay if it differed from the sort of content which can be easily located elsewhere on the internet. I’m guessing I would get quickly downvoted if I posted a review of the latest Star Wars trailer, but might do okay with a discussion of calculations of the cost of the Death Star, which got brought up on Marginal Revolution once, but I’m too lazy to look it up. There’s also a selection effect in that LessWrong is mostly computational and natural science types with very few people from a humanities background. This is probably a huge source of group think bias, but it would be difficult to surmise what effects this bias has. As for humor, many LW users seem to have a poorly calibrated sarcasm detector. A recent example; before I replied, fubarobfusco was at −2 for that comment.
[...] many LW users seem to have a poorly calibrated sarcasm detector. A recent example [...]
I’m not sure I would describe fubarobfusco’s comment as sarcastic, and I am not at all convinced that the reason why it was at −2 for a while was that early readers didn’t understand that fubarobfusco wasn’t literally claiming that typical modern office environments involve being “crammed up against other people with nothing to do” like cattle on a farm. I think it’s more likely just that a couple of the first people to see the comment happened not to find it very funny—which is perfectly consistent with understanding it.
(I did understand it, didn’t find it terribly funny, and didn’t vote on it in either direction.)
DanielLC’s comment indicates he at least didn’t get the joke. And if people downvote every time they don’t laugh, that’s a great way to encourage people to not make jokes.
I don’t think DanielLC’s comment does indicate that. (It could. But I know that for a variety of reasons I have sometimes chosen to treat comic exaggerations at face value despite understanding that they are intended as comic exaggerations, and I don’t see any reason to suppose that no one else ever does that.)
Perhaps the grandparent edit solves a few misunderstandings. Also, I would have understood your point better if you had said “graphic depictions of violence” instead of “violence”, for instance. If they had been phrased like forum rules. I thought you meant all instances thereof.
I would strongly disagree with that statement; both in your depiction of LessWrong and your depiction of autistics.
Me, I haven’t depicted a thing. For one, LW doesn’t actually follow those norms in their strict form (no object-level or meta-level discussions of those topics). My claim was about a hypothetical community that does. For another, I meant people who either need to be sheltered from the nastier aspects of the world, or are psychologically incapable of deviating from rigid, literal, uncreative, mechanistic thinking. Substitute Spock, automatons, whatever.
As for humor, many LW users seem to have a poorly calibrated sarcasm detector.
It’s not the sort of thing that gets better with lack of exposure.
You referred to “significantly less rationality than the average person, perhaps somewhere between children and autists”. In what possible world is that not depicting autistic people as having “significantly less rationality than the average person”?
(Treating “autists” as interchangeable with “Spock, automatons, whatever” is also pretty obnoxious, though it’s not exactly a matter of depicting anyone in any particular way.)
Look, I’m sorry if you found that obnoxious, but I’d rather not stress this point further. As far as I’m concerned it’s marginal to the discussion. Besides, I really should have gone to sleep some two hours ago. Can you just confirm whether you understood my point (not agreement or disagreement, just understanding), and leave it at that?
I didn’t originally say “graphic depictions of violence” because I didn’t mean to be that exact. There are different degrees between very literal and very abstract. I have no idea where that line lies; I’m only certain graphic depictions of violence crosses it.
There are different degrees of precision between “covers 1% of possible cases” and “covers 100% of possible cases”. Unless the audience is children 5 and under (here’s that thing about thresholds again), “violence” is much too general.
I would strongly disagree with that statement; both in your depiction of LessWrong and your depiction of autistics. I think if you made a list of all the things other communities avoid; many of theirs would be much, much longer. I would say it would contain many of the same items on the above list. I myself find graphic depictions of violence very disturbing. It deeply troubles me that so many people enjoy watching it. I’m not sure what limits this places on my rationality. I can still discuss violence in the abstract, but avoid discussing it in the concrete. But most internet communities would frown upon graphic depictions of violence too. LessWrong tends to have a lot of abstract discussions and only a few concrete discussions. This is typical of many internet forum discussions; not just exclusive to LessWrong. My guess is this is a much greater cause of bias than limits on what type of concrete discussions can come up.
I would be less opposed to graphic depictions of sex, but I would certainly never begin including it on here because I know many would find it offensive. I also believe it would lead to a deterioration of the quality of forum posts. I am not sure what limits this places on others’ rationality either; this strikes me as more of a personal choice.
As I said, I’m least certain about how pop culture and art discussions would be received. My guess is this would be okay if it differed from the sort of content which can be easily located elsewhere on the internet. I’m guessing I would get quickly downvoted if I posted a review of the latest Star Wars trailer, but might do okay with a discussion of calculations of the cost of the Death Star, which got brought up on Marginal Revolution once, but I’m too lazy to look it up. There’s also a selection effect in that LessWrong is mostly computational and natural science types with very few people from a humanities background. This is probably a huge source of group think bias, but it would be difficult to surmise what effects this bias has. As for humor, many LW users seem to have a poorly calibrated sarcasm detector. A recent example; before I replied, fubarobfusco was at −2 for that comment.
I’m not sure I would describe fubarobfusco’s comment as sarcastic, and I am not at all convinced that the reason why it was at −2 for a while was that early readers didn’t understand that fubarobfusco wasn’t literally claiming that typical modern office environments involve being “crammed up against other people with nothing to do” like cattle on a farm. I think it’s more likely just that a couple of the first people to see the comment happened not to find it very funny—which is perfectly consistent with understanding it.
(I did understand it, didn’t find it terribly funny, and didn’t vote on it in either direction.)
DanielLC’s comment indicates he at least didn’t get the joke. And if people downvote every time they don’t laugh, that’s a great way to encourage people to not make jokes.
I don’t think DanielLC’s comment does indicate that. (It could. But I know that for a variety of reasons I have sometimes chosen to treat comic exaggerations at face value despite understanding that they are intended as comic exaggerations, and I don’t see any reason to suppose that no one else ever does that.)
Perhaps the grandparent edit solves a few misunderstandings. Also, I would have understood your point better if you had said “graphic depictions of violence” instead of “violence”, for instance. If they had been phrased like forum rules. I thought you meant all instances thereof.
Me, I haven’t depicted a thing. For one, LW doesn’t actually follow those norms in their strict form (no object-level or meta-level discussions of those topics). My claim was about a hypothetical community that does. For another, I meant people who either need to be sheltered from the nastier aspects of the world, or are psychologically incapable of deviating from rigid, literal, uncreative, mechanistic thinking. Substitute Spock, automatons, whatever.
It’s not the sort of thing that gets better with lack of exposure.
You referred to “significantly less rationality than the average person, perhaps somewhere between children and autists”. In what possible world is that not depicting autistic people as having “significantly less rationality than the average person”?
(Treating “autists” as interchangeable with “Spock, automatons, whatever” is also pretty obnoxious, though it’s not exactly a matter of depicting anyone in any particular way.)
Look, I’m sorry if you found that obnoxious, but I’d rather not stress this point further. As far as I’m concerned it’s marginal to the discussion. Besides, I really should have gone to sleep some two hours ago. Can you just confirm whether you understood my point (not agreement or disagreement, just understanding), and leave it at that?
Oh yes, I understood your point. I just disagree with it and disapprove of how you stated it :-).
I didn’t originally say “graphic depictions of violence” because I didn’t mean to be that exact. There are different degrees between very literal and very abstract. I have no idea where that line lies; I’m only certain graphic depictions of violence crosses it.
If I may phrase this as a retort...
There are different degrees of precision between “covers 1% of possible cases” and “covers 100% of possible cases”. Unless the audience is children 5 and under (here’s that thing about thresholds again), “violence” is much too general.