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.
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.