I think some beliefs I have that others may not share is that:
a) for the Less Wrong project to succeed, we’ll need to develop a lot of cultural tools that are different from how mainstream society does things, and that may mean it’ll necessarily look weird to outsiders.
b) the Less Wrong brand is, frankly, already pretty thoroughly ruined. Not enough effort was put into PR concerns in the early days. By now, it’s well known as a pretty weird place, and trying to salvage that reputation seems like wasted effort to me. This is almost convenient though, because it means we can now focus mostly on doing what is effective rather than worrying (overly much, anyhow), about what looks weird.
(Epistemic effort: have not actually done anything to validate either of these assumptions, they are just how it seems to me)
So I think it, as far as posts on Less Wrong itself go, it’s totally fine to do things that don’t necessarily interface with outside status games.
I do think it’s also handy to develop cultural tools that are accessible to the rest of the world. On your facebook wall, it’d be nice to have status-tags that other people might want to adopt. Where possible, I do agree that we should cultivate norms on Less Wrong that work well in the rest of the world. But I don’t think we should completely shy away from norms.
I personally don’t have any intuitive sense of “thought about it for 5 minutes” to be a bad thing (especially for the reasons WhySpace describes—it tells people what to expect). And if you’re publishing a major essay that you want to be taken seriously, it’s important that you put more than 5 minutes of thought into it. If you want it to be taken seriously, the option of “actually put in more work that sounds genuinely impressive” is an option.
I think some beliefs I have that others may not share is that:
a) for the Less Wrong project to succeed, we’ll need to develop a lot of cultural tools that are different from how mainstream society does things, and that may mean it’ll necessarily look weird to outsiders.
b) the Less Wrong brand is, frankly, already pretty thoroughly ruined. Not enough effort was put into PR concerns in the early days. By now, it’s well known as a pretty weird place, and trying to salvage that reputation seems like wasted effort to me. This is almost convenient though, because it means we can now focus mostly on doing what is effective rather than worrying (overly much, anyhow), about what looks weird.
(Epistemic effort: have not actually done anything to validate either of these assumptions, they are just how it seems to me)
So I think it, as far as posts on Less Wrong itself go, it’s totally fine to do things that don’t necessarily interface with outside status games.
I do think it’s also handy to develop cultural tools that are accessible to the rest of the world. On your facebook wall, it’d be nice to have status-tags that other people might want to adopt. Where possible, I do agree that we should cultivate norms on Less Wrong that work well in the rest of the world. But I don’t think we should completely shy away from norms.
I personally don’t have any intuitive sense of “thought about it for 5 minutes” to be a bad thing (especially for the reasons WhySpace describes—it tells people what to expect). And if you’re publishing a major essay that you want to be taken seriously, it’s important that you put more than 5 minutes of thought into it. If you want it to be taken seriously, the option of “actually put in more work that sounds genuinely impressive” is an option.