Perhaps LW is vulnerable to getting sidetracked into futile discussions of NRx in particular because a lot of the LW memeset is shared with a lot of the NRxrz. Indeed, the NRxrz pride themselves on their clear-sighted rationality. From within, the participants think they’re having a rational discussion, while from without it resembles no such thing, it’s just politics as usual.
Yup. Foretold many times, actually. We even talked about Walled Gardens and such. I’d place a fairly high probability that many of the founding members would view LW as a lot less interesting now—not because of Reaction, but because of the net total politics.
LW doesn’t downvote to indicate disagreement. They upvote whenever an argument is phrased in an interesting way even if they disagree entirely. NRx is interesting. In short, LW are the “open minded progressives” to NRx’s Open Letter.
All of which would have been fine, actually, if it didn’t increase the total amount of time in useless arguments. The main thing of value that was lost was Total Amount of Homogeneity (and well, I suppose the acquisition of a bunch of people who really like talking about politics doesn’t help).
I suppose liking to talk about politics is the core of the problem here. Merely giving a name to a political faction is a package fallacy already.
For example, why are we debating “neoreaction”, instead of tabooing the world, replacing the symbol with a set of specific statements, and debating each statement separately? By debating “neoreaction” we have already failed as rationalists, and what we do then is just digging the hole deeper.
As it was foretold of old.
Perhaps LW is vulnerable to getting sidetracked into futile discussions of NRx in particular because a lot of the LW memeset is shared with a lot of the NRxrz. Indeed, the NRxrz pride themselves on their clear-sighted rationality. From within, the participants think they’re having a rational discussion, while from without it resembles no such thing, it’s just politics as usual.
Yup. Foretold many times, actually. We even talked about Walled Gardens and such. I’d place a fairly high probability that many of the founding members would view LW as a lot less interesting now—not because of Reaction, but because of the net total politics.
LW doesn’t downvote to indicate disagreement. They upvote whenever an argument is phrased in an interesting way even if they disagree entirely. NRx is interesting. In short, LW are the “open minded progressives” to NRx’s Open Letter.
All of which would have been fine, actually, if it didn’t increase the total amount of time in useless arguments. The main thing of value that was lost was Total Amount of Homogeneity (and well, I suppose the acquisition of a bunch of people who really like talking about politics doesn’t help).
I suppose liking to talk about politics is the core of the problem here. Merely giving a name to a political faction is a package fallacy already.
For example, why are we debating “neoreaction”, instead of tabooing the world, replacing the symbol with a set of specific statements, and debating each statement separately? By debating “neoreaction” we have already failed as rationalists, and what we do then is just digging the hole deeper.
Or you could call it a win in diversity.