I really dislike “The LeastWrong”. it takes something I was already on edge about and elevates it to an explicit phrase. How about just “Review Winners” or “Voted Best” or something else that doesn’t have weird implications if someone fails to interpret it as a joke?
Just to confirm, where the “on edge” thing is presumably the name “LessWrong” (which can be interpreted in a kind of arrogant way of implying we are less wrong than other people)?
I second the concern that using “LeastWrong” on the site grants undue legitimacy to the bad “than others” interpretation of the brand name (as contrasted to the intended “all models are wrong, but” meaning). “Best Of” is clear and doesn’t distort the brand.
Yeah, I can kind of see that, though I don’t feel like I can super make explicit what the implicit line of reasoning for that association is. If you have an idea of spelling it out, I would find it helpful for thinking about the tradeoffs.
Edit: An initial attempt is “The LeastWrong” feels a bit like a global claim of “these are the least wrong things on the internet”. It also puts emphasis on the posts on the site being the kind of thing that’s described as “less wrong” on a kind of factual level as opposed to the people aspiring to be less wrong themselves in a more holistic sense.
But this doesn’t feel super coherent to me. Like, the central interpretation I have for the “LessWrong” name is on the about page:
The road to wisdom? Well, it’s plain and simple to express:
Err and err and err again but less and less and less.
– Piet Hein
And the meaning in here feels compatible with having some posts that are less wrong than others, and a collective effort to try to find the “least wrong” content. In general, I feel pretty good with having a thing we collective contribute that’s trying to be “least wrong”, and it doesn’t feel super like it makes a comparative claim to the rest of the world. Though I do still feel like there is something real here.
Edit: An initial attempt is “The LeastWrong” feels a bit like a global claim of “these are the least wrong things on the internet”.
This is how it feels to me.
Whether you can find a logic in which that interpretation is not coherent doesn’t seem relevant to me. You can always construct a story according to which a particular association is actually wrong, but that doesn’t stop people from having that association. (And I think there are reasonable grounds for people to be suspicious about such stories, in that they enable a kind of motte-and-bailey: using a phrasing that sends the message X, while saying that of course we don’t mean to send that message and here’s an alternative interpretation that’s compatible with that phrasing. So I think that a lot of the people who’d find the title objectionable would be unpersuaded by your alternative interpretation, even assuming that they bothered to listen to it, and they would not be unreasonable to reject it.)
Comment retracted because right after writing it, I realized that the “leastwrong” is a section on LW, not its own site. I thought there was a separate leastwrong.com or something. In this case, I have much less of a feeling that it makes a global claim.
I still feel that that is the claim it is making. It’s obviously in jest to me, but my thinking about it is marred by this already being the main complaint people make about the name “lesswrong”, and reifying it further seems like going the wrong direction.
I really dislike “The LeastWrong”. it takes something I was already on edge about and elevates it to an explicit phrase. How about just “Review Winners” or “Voted Best” or something else that doesn’t have weird implications if someone fails to interpret it as a joke?
Just to confirm, where the “on edge” thing is presumably the name “LessWrong” (which can be interpreted in a kind of arrogant way of implying we are less wrong than other people)?
I second the concern that using “LeastWrong” on the site grants undue legitimacy to the bad “than others” interpretation of the brand name (as contrasted to the intended “all models are wrong, but” meaning). “Best Of” is clear and doesn’t distort the brand.
Yeah, I can kind of see that, though I don’t feel like I can super make explicit what the implicit line of reasoning for that association is. If you have an idea of spelling it out, I would find it helpful for thinking about the tradeoffs.
Edit: An initial attempt is “The LeastWrong” feels a bit like a global claim of “these are the least wrong things on the internet”. It also puts emphasis on the posts on the site being the kind of thing that’s described as “less wrong” on a kind of factual level as opposed to the people aspiring to be less wrong themselves in a more holistic sense.
But this doesn’t feel super coherent to me. Like, the central interpretation I have for the “LessWrong” name is on the about page:
And the meaning in here feels compatible with having some posts that are less wrong than others, and a collective effort to try to find the “least wrong” content. In general, I feel pretty good with having a thing we collective contribute that’s trying to be “least wrong”, and it doesn’t feel super like it makes a comparative claim to the rest of the world. Though I do still feel like there is something real here.
This is how it feels to me.
Whether you can find a logic in which that interpretation is not coherent doesn’t seem relevant to me. You can always construct a story according to which a particular association is actually wrong, but that doesn’t stop people from having that association. (And I think there are reasonable grounds for people to be suspicious about such stories, in that they enable a kind of motte-and-bailey: using a phrasing that sends the message X, while saying that of course we don’t mean to send that message and here’s an alternative interpretation that’s compatible with that phrasing. So I think that a lot of the people who’d find the title objectionable would be unpersuaded by your alternative interpretation, even assuming that they bothered to listen to it, and they would not be unreasonable to reject it.)
Comment retracted because right after writing it, I realized that the “leastwrong” is a section on LW, not its own site. I thought there was a separate leastwrong.com or something. In this case, I have much less of a feeling that it makes a global claim.
I still feel that that is the claim it is making. It’s obviously in jest to me, but my thinking about it is marred by this already being the main complaint people make about the name “lesswrong”, and reifying it further seems like going the wrong direction.