Yes, they need to know our buttons and press them. Such as:
you are an unfriendly place for women;
you say that politics is the mindkiller, but secretly all of you are libertarians (or all of you are conservatives);
you are actually a cult;
...and for the best impact: all of the above, in a long article, with citations out of context from random parts of the website; quoting some offensive and heavily downvoted comments and presenting them as a typical LW content; claiming to be an expert on artificial intelligence or quantum physics and claiming that everything LW says on these topics is a pseudoscience. Did I forget something important? Oh yes, the basilisk! And end with a huge generalization that this all proves that LW is a horrible group of people, and that you will tell everyone you know to avoid LW: both your personal friends, and also any scientist or an organizer of an atheist or skeptic meetup.
(I am not saying this is what the linked article did. Just that this is what I would include into a troll manual, and bet money that LW couldn’t resist discussing such article. But a subset of this is enough to succeed.)
(As it happens, that article’s been linked before in Discussion without triggering a big argument. But the Discussion post was deleted, and the post only mentioned that “Cult of Bayes’ Theorem” article in a parenthetical aside, so it’s not a very good natural experiment.)
Yes, they need to know our buttons and press them. Such as:
you are an unfriendly place for women;
you say that politics is the mindkiller, but secretly all of you are libertarians (or all of you are conservatives);
you are actually a cult;
...and for the best impact: all of the above, in a long article, with citations out of context from random parts of the website; quoting some offensive and heavily downvoted comments and presenting them as a typical LW content; claiming to be an expert on artificial intelligence or quantum physics and claiming that everything LW says on these topics is a pseudoscience. Did I forget something important? Oh yes, the basilisk! And end with a huge generalization that this all proves that LW is a horrible group of people, and that you will tell everyone you know to avoid LW: both your personal friends, and also any scientist or an organizer of an atheist or skeptic meetup.
(I am not saying this is what the linked article did. Just that this is what I would include into a troll manual, and bet money that LW couldn’t resist discussing such article. But a subset of this is enough to succeed.)
You forgot torture vs dust specks, nerd rapture, building a benevolent God, and many-worlds.
...and cryonics.
Eh, it’s been done.
(As it happens, that article’s been linked before in Discussion without triggering a big argument. But the Discussion post was deleted, and the post only mentioned that “Cult of Bayes’ Theorem” article in a parenthetical aside, so it’s not a very good natural experiment.)