a lot of lot of horrible, horrible stuff that I never, ever want to be associated with.
As a lurker and relatively new person to this community I’ve now seen this sentiment expressed multiple places but without any specific examples. Could you (or anyone else) please provide some? I’d really like to know more about this before I start talking about Less Wrong to my friends/family/coworkers/etc.
Feel free to PM me if you don’t want to discuss it publicly.
A lot of this content is concentrated among the users who eventually created MoreRight. Check out that site for a concentrated dose of what also pops up here.
But but … he posted a link to that (or some other video of him ranting at the camera), and then was downvoted to oblivion and demolished in the comments, while whining about how he was being oppressed.
Things like that don’t seem remotely mainstream on LW, do they? (I don’t read all the big comment threads …)
If we keep telling ourselves that LW is full of horrible stuff, we start believing it. Then any negative example, even if it happens once in a while and is quickly downvoted, becomes a confirmation of the model.
This is a website with hundreds of thousands of comments. Just because a few dozen of the comments are about X, it doesn’t prove much.
EDIT: And I think threads like this contribute heavily to the availability bias. It’s like an exercise in making all the bad things more available. If you use this strategy as an individual, it’s called depression.
Just imagine that once in a while someone would accuse you of being a horrible human being, and (assuming they had a record of everything you ever did) would show you a compilation of the worst things you have ever did in the past (ignoring completely anything good you did, because that’s somehow irrelevant to the debate) and told you: this is you, this is why you are a horrible person! Well, that’s pretty much what we are doing here.
That guy is funny. Definitely not someone who would be well respected here. His model of the world is broken and he’s trying to make the world fit his model, instead of the other way around.
As a lurker and relatively new person to this community I’ve now seen this sentiment expressed multiple places but without any specific examples. Could you (or anyone else) please provide some? I’d really like to know more about this before I start talking about Less Wrong to my friends/family/coworkers/etc.
Feel free to PM me if you don’t want to discuss it publicly.
A lot of this content is concentrated among the users who eventually created MoreRight. Check out that site for a concentrated dose of what also pops up here.
Politics, eh? I’m confused.
This guy was a pretty big poster on LW, I think. Best example I can come up with, I’m sure there are better ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq5vRKiQlUQ
But but … he posted a link to that (or some other video of him ranting at the camera), and then was downvoted to oblivion and demolished in the comments, while whining about how he was being oppressed.
Things like that don’t seem remotely mainstream on LW, do they? (I don’t read all the big comment threads …)
Oh, okay. For some reason I thought he was fairly respected here.
A lie repeated a hundred times becomes available.
If we keep telling ourselves that LW is full of horrible stuff, we start believing it. Then any negative example, even if it happens once in a while and is quickly downvoted, becomes a confirmation of the model.
This is a website with hundreds of thousands of comments. Just because a few dozen of the comments are about X, it doesn’t prove much.
EDIT: And I think threads like this contribute heavily to the availability bias. It’s like an exercise in making all the bad things more available. If you use this strategy as an individual, it’s called depression.
Just imagine that once in a while someone would accuse you of being a horrible human being, and (assuming they had a record of everything you ever did) would show you a compilation of the worst things you have ever did in the past (ignoring completely anything good you did, because that’s somehow irrelevant to the debate) and told you: this is you, this is why you are a horrible person! Well, that’s pretty much what we are doing here.
That was awesome!
The dark secrets thread like a year ago was one of my favorite threads to read
Any key words I should use to find that one?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9kf/ive_had_it_with_those_dark_rumours_about_our/
This one too, and maybe some other one I can’t think of at the moment.
A pretty minor poster, but there was someone who was a fan of his who posted a lot of links to him for a while. I think he’s gotten worse.
And thus, more entertaining.
That guy is funny. Definitely not someone who would be well respected here. His model of the world is broken and he’s trying to make the world fit his model, instead of the other way around.
In one of his videos there’s a part where he argues that cigarettes are actually good for you. LOL