In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy’s blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don’t count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can’t think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I’m inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there’s freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person—a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
I’ve looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the “No Hostility” threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.
[09:05] Eliezer: what you say is another issue, especially when speaking to nonrationalists, and then it is well to bear in mind that words don’t have fixed meanings; the meaning of the sounds that issue from your lips is whatever occurs in the mind of the listener. If they’re going to misinterpret something then you shouldn’t say it to them no matter what the words mean inside your own head
[09:06] Eliezer: often you are just screwed unless you want to go back and teach them rationality from scratch, and in a case like that, all you can do is say whatever creates the least inaccurate image
[09:06] X: 10 to 1000 is misleading when you say it to a nonrationalist?
[09:06] Eliezer: “I don’t know” is a good way to duck when you say it to someone who doesn’t know about probability distributions
[09:07] Eliezer: if they thought I was certain, or that my statement implied actual knowledge of the tree
[09:07] Eliezer: then the statement would mislead them
[09:07] Eliezer: and if I knew this, and did it anyway for my own purposes, it would be a lie
[09:08] Eliezer: if I just couldn’t think of anything better to say, then it would be honest but not true, if you can see the distinction
[09:08] Eliezer: honest for me, but the statement that formed in their minds would still not be true
[09:09] X: most people will say to you.… but you said....10-1000 apples
[09:09] Eliezer: then you’re just screwed
[09:10] Eliezer: nothing you can do will create in their minds a true understanding, not even “I don’t know”
[09:10] X: why bother, why not say i don’t know?
[09:10] Eliezer: honesty therefore consists of misleading them the least and telling them the most
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one’s self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one’s best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik’s that focus more on appealing to people who aren’t yet rational.
There’s a hypothesis I’ve seen tossed around that good blogs during that period existed because lots of people were blogging, and fewer people are blogging now because of microblogging. I haven’t seen whether the relevant facts cited there are even true, and I can’t find a reference to the hypothesis.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.
In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy’s blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don’t count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can’t think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I’m inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there’s freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person—a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
I’ve looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the “No Hostility” threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.
From I Don’t Know:
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one’s self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one’s best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.
Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik’s that focus more on appealing to people who aren’t yet rational.
I didn’t see myself as responding to his point, just to yours.
There’s a hypothesis I’ve seen tossed around that good blogs during that period existed because lots of people were blogging, and fewer people are blogging now because of microblogging. I haven’t seen whether the relevant facts cited there are even true, and I can’t find a reference to the hypothesis.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.