The failure mode here doesn’t come out of Less Wrong being ontologically nerdy but the potential for it to become teleologically nerdy. To clarify, the topics of analysis that we see here are going to be seen as nerdy by most of the mainstream; short of changing the culture there’s no way around that. But assuming that rationality and nerdiness are causally entangled with each other, that epistemic rationality implies nerdiness in other domains or vice versa, is not only wrong but dangerously so.
The community seems to be fairly adept at avoiding the general class of failures that this belongs to; it’s managed to stay mostly clear of them in the political domain, for example. That’s good. But the wider nerd culture is extremely bad about confusing its cultural preferences with its notion of rationality, as the appropriate fandoms’ attitudes toward Justin Bieber listeners, Stephenie Meyer readers, and Wii Fit players should show. At times it can shade into something that almost resembles a religion, as in Neal Stephenson’s In The Beginning… Was The Command Line. With this in mind, and bearing in mind that this community is by any measure full of nerds, it ought to be guarded against specifically.
We might end up attracting more and more rational people if we branch our pop-cultural examples out of fandom and into more mainstream domains, though that’s only as effective as demographics and cultural norms will allow. But what we lose (or gain) from not doing so is absolutely insignificant compared to the potential bias we could introduce by entangling the myths of our tribe with the laws of the universe.
But the wider nerd culture is extremely bad about confusing its cultural preferences with its notion of rationality, as the appropriate fandoms’ attitudes toward [...] Stephenie Meyer readers
I do find that when people link to my fic, e.g. on Livejournal, they are very defensive and apologetic and incredulous about it. More so than the links I’ve seen that go to HP:MoR. Twilight isn’t considered respectable in the sorts of circles that are open to rationalist fiction.
The failure mode here doesn’t come out of Less Wrong being ontologically nerdy but the potential for it to become teleologically nerdy. To clarify, the topics of analysis that we see here are going to be seen as nerdy by most of the mainstream; short of changing the culture there’s no way around that. But assuming that rationality and nerdiness are causally entangled with each other, that epistemic rationality implies nerdiness in other domains or vice versa, is not only wrong but dangerously so.
The community seems to be fairly adept at avoiding the general class of failures that this belongs to; it’s managed to stay mostly clear of them in the political domain, for example. That’s good. But the wider nerd culture is extremely bad about confusing its cultural preferences with its notion of rationality, as the appropriate fandoms’ attitudes toward Justin Bieber listeners, Stephenie Meyer readers, and Wii Fit players should show. At times it can shade into something that almost resembles a religion, as in Neal Stephenson’s In The Beginning… Was The Command Line. With this in mind, and bearing in mind that this community is by any measure full of nerds, it ought to be guarded against specifically.
We might end up attracting more and more rational people if we branch our pop-cultural examples out of fandom and into more mainstream domains, though that’s only as effective as demographics and cultural norms will allow. But what we lose (or gain) from not doing so is absolutely insignificant compared to the potential bias we could introduce by entangling the myths of our tribe with the laws of the universe.
At least we don’t have that specific problem.
I do find that when people link to my fic, e.g. on Livejournal, they are very defensive and apologetic and incredulous about it. More so than the links I’ve seen that go to HP:MoR. Twilight isn’t considered respectable in the sorts of circles that are open to rationalist fiction.