I was discussing the community, not the site. The site is clearly intended for people who are open to the idea of becoming more Rational. The community, however, is not identical with the target audience.
And what I’m saying is that the community should have a separate site than the target audience because they’re at different skill levels. There should be a place where people go to discuss whether or not certain things are optimal, and there should be a place where people go to learn to distinguish between optimal and not-optimal, and those sites should be connected.
LessWrong is the latter type of site, but this post proposes that it firewall itself from discussions of optimalness entirely and I think that is an overreaction. Instead, we should just make a different website that is LessWrong affiliated but which focuses on optimalness overall and pays less attention to rationality—how about MoreRight.com?
LessWrong is the latter type of site, but this post proposes that it firewall itself from discussions of optimalness entirely and I think that is an overreaction.
You seem to have misread the post. It is ‘rational’ that is to be distinguished from ‘optimal’, not the website which is to be firewalled from discussions of optimalness. Eliezer didn’t discourage discussions of optimalness (that is, the application of principles of instrumental rationality to specific scenarios). He merely discouraged excessive judgement of people who don’t necessarily agree on what is ‘optimal’ in all situations.
Dividing into two domains and ‘logical websites’ has both an isolating effect and increases the costs of participation in both areas.
This post proposes that people may disagree with you regarding what is optimal even though everyone involved is mostly Rational. For that matter, they may even disagree about some things which appear to you to be obvious observations.
I was discussing the community, not the site. The site is clearly intended for people who are open to the idea of becoming more Rational. The community, however, is not identical with the target audience.
And what I’m saying is that the community should have a separate site than the target audience because they’re at different skill levels. There should be a place where people go to discuss whether or not certain things are optimal, and there should be a place where people go to learn to distinguish between optimal and not-optimal, and those sites should be connected.
LessWrong is the latter type of site, but this post proposes that it firewall itself from discussions of optimalness entirely and I think that is an overreaction. Instead, we should just make a different website that is LessWrong affiliated but which focuses on optimalness overall and pays less attention to rationality—how about MoreRight.com?
You seem to have misread the post. It is ‘rational’ that is to be distinguished from ‘optimal’, not the website which is to be firewalled from discussions of optimalness. Eliezer didn’t discourage discussions of optimalness (that is, the application of principles of instrumental rationality to specific scenarios). He merely discouraged excessive judgement of people who don’t necessarily agree on what is ‘optimal’ in all situations.
Dividing into two domains and ‘logical websites’ has both an isolating effect and increases the costs of participation in both areas.
This post proposes that people may disagree with you regarding what is optimal even though everyone involved is mostly Rational. For that matter, they may even disagree about some things which appear to you to be obvious observations.