My take: Bits of this review come off as a bit too status-oriented to me. This is ironic, because the best part of the review is towards the end when it talks about the risk of rationality becoming a Fandom.
Yes, basically. It is well-written and funny (of course), but a lot of it is wrong. What was, say, the last “article explaining Bayes” you saw on LW, which is a central example of his of the staleness and repetition killing LW? Would I find 3 or 4 new articles on how Bayes’s theorem is like a burrito if I go over to the Main page right now...?* (Personally, I wouldn’t mind reviving some more Bayes on LW these days, and I have an idea for one myself.)
And saying we weren’t weird to begin with but have gotten weirder...? I have no idea how he could have gotten that idea—trust me when I say that people on LW used to be a lot weirder, or hey, no need to do that—just go crack open a copy of Great Mambo Chicken or ask a question like ‘was a larger percentage of LW signed up for cryonics in 2009 or in 2024?’ Sorry, everyone who joined post-MoR, but you’re just a lot more normal and less weird than the OG LWers like Hanson or Clippy or Yudkowsky or even Roko. (Yes, you still have a shot at a normal life & happiness, but your posts are not remotely as unhinged, so who’s to say who’s better off in the end?)
Reading this post reminds me of my standard online heuristic: just because someone is spending a lot of effort writing about you, does not mean that it is worth a minute of your time to read it.
(This is of course a subset of the general heuristic that most writing has nothing worth reading in it; but it bears keeping in mind that this doesn’t change when the writing is about you.)
Yeah, I am not even sure what was the point of the article. What is the thing we are supposed to update about? Writing in a different style, or changing our opinions (about what exactly?), or finding completely new topics to talk about so that we are not boring the article author, or...?
My take: Bits of this review come off as a bit too status-oriented to me. This is ironic, because the best part of the review is towards the end when it talks about the risk of rationality becoming a Fandom.
Yes, basically. It is well-written and funny (of course), but a lot of it is wrong. What was, say, the last “article explaining Bayes” you saw on LW, which is a central example of his of the staleness and repetition killing LW? Would I find 3 or 4 new articles on how Bayes’s theorem is like a burrito if I go over to the Main page right now...?* (Personally, I wouldn’t mind reviving some more Bayes on LW these days, and I have an idea for one myself.)
And saying we weren’t weird to begin with but have gotten weirder...? I have no idea how he could have gotten that idea—trust me when I say that people on LW used to be a lot weirder, or hey, no need to do that—just go crack open a copy of Great Mambo Chicken or ask a question like ‘was a larger percentage of LW signed up for cryonics in 2009 or in 2024?’ Sorry, everyone who joined post-MoR, but you’re just a lot more normal and less weird than the OG LWers like Hanson or Clippy or Yudkowsky or even Roko. (Yes, you still have a shot at a normal life & happiness, but your posts are not remotely as unhinged, so who’s to say who’s better off in the end?)
* that was rhetorical, but I of course checked anyway and of the first 30 or 40 posts, the only one that even comes close to being about Bayesianism seems to be https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KSdqxrrEootGSpKKE/the-solomonoff-prior-is-malign-is-a-special-case-of-a which is not very much at all.
Reading this post reminds me of my standard online heuristic: just because someone is spending a lot of effort writing about you, does not mean that it is worth a minute of your time to read it.
(This is of course a subset of the general heuristic that most writing has nothing worth reading in it; but it bears keeping in mind that this doesn’t change when the writing is about you.)
Yeah, I am not even sure what was the point of the article. What is the thing we are supposed to update about? Writing in a different style, or changing our opinions (about what exactly?), or finding completely new topics to talk about so that we are not boring the article author, or...?