The slightly longer answer is that it probably does not matter unless the niceness reaches the level at which people become too deferential towards the leaders of the community, a failure mode that I personally do not worry about.
Parenthetically, none of the newsgroups I frequented in the 1990s had a leader unless my memory is epically failing me right now. Erik Naggum came the closest (on comp.lang.lisp) but the maintenance of his not-quite-leader status required him to expend a prodigious amount time (and words) to continue to prove his expertise and commitment to Lisp and to browbeat other participants.
(And my guess is the the constant public browbeating cost him at least one consulting job. It certainly did not make him look attractive.)
The most likely reason for the emotional tone of LW is that the participants the community most admire have altruism, philanthropy or a refined kind of friendliness as one of their primary motivations for participation, and for them to maintain a certain level of niceness is probably effortless or well-rehearsed and instrumentally very useful.
Specifically, Eliezer and Anna have altruism, philanthropy or human friendliness as one of their primary motivations with probability .9. There are almost certainly others here with that as one of the primary motivations, but they are hard for me to read or I just do not have enough information (in the form of either a large body of online writings like Eliezer’s or sufficient face time) to form an opinion worth expressing.
More precisely, if they were less nice than they were, it would be difficult for them to fulfill their mission of improving people’s rationality and networking to reduce e-risks, but if they were too nice it would have too much of an inhibitory effect on the critical (judgemental) faculties of them and their interlocutors, so they end up being less nice than the average suburban Californian, say, but significantly nicer than the average niceness of most of the online communities frequented by programmers and others whose work relies heavily on the critical faculty, i.e., where to succeed at the work requires being able to perceive very subtle faults in something.
In other words, I have a working hypothesis that there is a tension between the internal emotional state optimal for “interpersonal” goals (like networking and teaching rationality) and the state optimal for making a rational analysis of a situation or argument. This tension certainly exists for me. I have no direct evidence that the same tension exists for the leaders of this community, but again that is my tentative hypothesis.
So, IMHO the important question is not the effects of the current level of niceness but rather the effects of altruistically motivated participants. I should share my thinking on that some day when I have more time.
The short answer is I do not know.
The slightly longer answer is that it probably does not matter unless the niceness reaches the level at which people become too deferential towards the leaders of the community, a failure mode that I personally do not worry about.
Parenthetically, none of the newsgroups I frequented in the 1990s had a leader unless my memory is epically failing me right now. Erik Naggum came the closest (on comp.lang.lisp) but the maintenance of his not-quite-leader status required him to expend a prodigious amount time (and words) to continue to prove his expertise and commitment to Lisp and to browbeat other participants. (And my guess is the the constant public browbeating cost him at least one consulting job. It certainly did not make him look attractive.)
The most likely reason for the emotional tone of LW is that the participants the community most admire have altruism, philanthropy or a refined kind of friendliness as one of their primary motivations for participation, and for them to maintain a certain level of niceness is probably effortless or well-rehearsed and instrumentally very useful.
Specifically, Eliezer and Anna have altruism, philanthropy or human friendliness as one of their primary motivations with probability .9. There are almost certainly others here with that as one of the primary motivations, but they are hard for me to read or I just do not have enough information (in the form of either a large body of online writings like Eliezer’s or sufficient face time) to form an opinion worth expressing.
More precisely, if they were less nice than they were, it would be difficult for them to fulfill their mission of improving people’s rationality and networking to reduce e-risks, but if they were too nice it would have too much of an inhibitory effect on the critical (judgemental) faculties of them and their interlocutors, so they end up being less nice than the average suburban Californian, say, but significantly nicer than the average niceness of most of the online communities frequented by programmers and others whose work relies heavily on the critical faculty, i.e., where to succeed at the work requires being able to perceive very subtle faults in something.
In other words, I have a working hypothesis that there is a tension between the internal emotional state optimal for “interpersonal” goals (like networking and teaching rationality) and the state optimal for making a rational analysis of a situation or argument. This tension certainly exists for me. I have no direct evidence that the same tension exists for the leaders of this community, but again that is my tentative hypothesis.
So, IMHO the important question is not the effects of the current level of niceness but rather the effects of altruistically motivated participants. I should share my thinking on that some day when I have more time.