One of the things I find most charming about LW, compared to places like RationalWiki, is how much emphasis there is on self-improvement and your mistakes, not mistakes made by other people because they’re dumb.
I agree that LW is much better than RationalWiki, but I still think that the norms for discussion are much too far in the direction of focus on how other commenters are wrong as opposed to how one might oneself be wrong.
I know that there’s a selection effect (with respect to the more frustrating interactions standing out). But people not infrequently mistakenly believe that I’m wrong about things that I know much more about than they do, with very high confidence, and in such instances I find the connotations that I’m unsound to be exasperating.
I don’t think that this is just a problem for me rather than a problem for the community in general: I know a number of very high quality thinkers in real life who are uninterested in participating on LW explicitly because they don’t want to engage with commenters who are highly confident that their own positions are incorrect. There’s another selection effect here: such people aren’t salient because they’re invisible to the online community.
I know that there’s a selection effect (with respect to the more frustrating interactions standing out).
I agree that those frustrating interactions both happen and are frustrating, and that it leads to a general acidification of the discussion as people who don’t want to deal with it leave. Reversing that process in a sustainable way is probably the most valuable way to improve LW in the medium term.
I agree that LW is much better than RationalWiki, but I still think that the norms for discussion are much too far in the direction of focus on how other commenters are wrong as opposed to how one might oneself be wrong.
I know that there’s a selection effect (with respect to the more frustrating interactions standing out). But people not infrequently mistakenly believe that I’m wrong about things that I know much more about than they do, with very high confidence, and in such instances I find the connotations that I’m unsound to be exasperating.
I don’t think that this is just a problem for me rather than a problem for the community in general: I know a number of very high quality thinkers in real life who are uninterested in participating on LW explicitly because they don’t want to engage with commenters who are highly confident that their own positions are incorrect. There’s another selection effect here: such people aren’t salient because they’re invisible to the online community.
I agree that those frustrating interactions both happen and are frustrating, and that it leads to a general acidification of the discussion as people who don’t want to deal with it leave. Reversing that process in a sustainable way is probably the most valuable way to improve LW in the medium term.