So people feel that LW should be focussed on other things than critiquing influential but unqualified opinions. I am sympathetic to this. It is somewhat of a Sisyphus task to weed out bad opinions from public discourse and responding on LW is probably not the most effient way of doing it in any case.
Personally, when I am convinced of something, I try to find the strongest critiques of that belief. For instance, I’ve looked for criticisms of Yudkowsky and even read a little on r/SneerClub to evaluate whether I’ve been duped by internet lunatics :). If other people acted the same, it would be valuable to have critiques of bad opinions, even if they are posted where the intended audience otherwise never visits. But I suspect few people act like that.
I would be interested in if you have suggestions for what are better ways to effect public opinion than posts like this one. I guess the rationality project of raising the global sanity level is partly aimed at this.
Definitely guilty of preaching to the choir :).
So people feel that LW should be focussed on other things than critiquing influential but unqualified opinions. I am sympathetic to this. It is somewhat of a Sisyphus task to weed out bad opinions from public discourse and responding on LW is probably not the most effient way of doing it in any case.
Personally, when I am convinced of something, I try to find the strongest critiques of that belief. For instance, I’ve looked for criticisms of Yudkowsky and even read a little on r/SneerClub to evaluate whether I’ve been duped by internet lunatics :). If other people acted the same, it would be valuable to have critiques of bad opinions, even if they are posted where the intended audience otherwise never visits. But I suspect few people act like that.
I would be interested in if you have suggestions for what are better ways to effect public opinion than posts like this one. I guess the rationality project of raising the global sanity level is partly aimed at this.