Well, they are atheist in almost any of the likely or useful senses. And to be fair, a lot of the ones I found irritating were highly intelligent. The problem was a classic one for an awful lot of bright people. They’d been surrounded by people who were fairly blatantly irrational, or at least appeared so to a certain kind of mind that takes the religious claims literally. They’d seen these ideas as wrong, and not understood how anyone could hold them. Then they’d found a group of people who’d rejected the same things and so naturally made very strong emotional links to that as an in-group, and over-estimated its general rationality.
The thing that makes LW exceptional is that it could so easily be very like this, it has so many of the ingredients, but that there is a drive to focus in on the most difficult questions and to constantly challenge people parrotting in-group views. After a few weeks on here, I thought of some questions that would undermine the leading views on here, but would usually be laughed off as not worth thinking about (for instance, how utilitarianism works when part of the question is how many people exist) but they’ve been dealt with here more thoroughly than anywhere else I’ve seen.
Well, they are atheist in almost any of the likely or useful senses. And to be fair, a lot of the ones I found irritating were highly intelligent. The problem was a classic one for an awful lot of bright people. They’d been surrounded by people who were fairly blatantly irrational, or at least appeared so to a certain kind of mind that takes the religious claims literally. They’d seen these ideas as wrong, and not understood how anyone could hold them. Then they’d found a group of people who’d rejected the same things and so naturally made very strong emotional links to that as an in-group, and over-estimated its general rationality.
The thing that makes LW exceptional is that it could so easily be very like this, it has so many of the ingredients, but that there is a drive to focus in on the most difficult questions and to constantly challenge people parrotting in-group views. After a few weeks on here, I thought of some questions that would undermine the leading views on here, but would usually be laughed off as not worth thinking about (for instance, how utilitarianism works when part of the question is how many people exist) but they’ve been dealt with here more thoroughly than anywhere else I’ve seen.