In my judgement ABrooks was not trolling, and instead raised a point of view that experience on LW encouraged me to consider.
I think it is true that some members of LW, on some occasions do believe they are justified in expressing contempt for the beliefs of outsiders, sometimes this is done without expressing the justification, on other occasions the justification has been expressed and refuted yet the contempt remains and on yet other occasions the justification is reasonable. I leave the other branches of the scenario for the community to express at their convenience.
I don’t however consider the LW community on the whole to be toxic to rationality as one cannot and shouldn’t judge an entire community based upon isolated actions of a potential unrepresentative sample. I think the statement
Less Wrong is just a community that is on the whole, and despite it’s best efforts and intentions, toxic to rationality
Is false, yet as one can see in my 2nd paragraph in this post, a change of the numbers from “on the whole” to “some members, some of the time” supports that the gist of the hypothesis deserves consideration, despite that I believe the original hypothesis is false.
Possibly a more succinct description of the issue under discussion is when an individuals self serving bias meets a groups group serving bias. The individual being an outsider.
When one considers that an aim of LW is the removal of biases, labelling a presentation of a possible group serving bias as a “troll” is not in the spirit—or vibe if you prefer—of LW. I do understand why one would want to not waste time on something as obviously false as the original hypothesis, yet I think that the updated hypothesis deserves consideration from members of the community.
What is quite interesting when reconsidering the original hypothesis of ABrook, is the taking into consideration of outsiders.
If outsiders strongly associate rationality with LW and LW is negatively perceived, then the original hypothesis has some weight.
Fortunately we have an outsider… that’s me, and,
I do have some negative perceptions of LW, yet more fortunately for rationality a negative perception of LW is that I do not strongly associate LW with rationality. I presume some will appreciate the beautiful irony of this construct and further appreciate and then avoid the infinite spirals it produces.
In my judgement ABrooks was not trolling, and instead raised a point of view that experience on LW encouraged me to consider.
I think it is true that some members of LW, on some occasions do believe they are justified in expressing contempt for the beliefs of outsiders, sometimes this is done without expressing the justification, on other occasions the justification has been expressed and refuted yet the contempt remains and on yet other occasions the justification is reasonable. I leave the other branches of the scenario for the community to express at their convenience.
I don’t however consider the LW community on the whole to be toxic to rationality as one cannot and shouldn’t judge an entire community based upon isolated actions of a potential unrepresentative sample. I think the statement
Is false, yet as one can see in my 2nd paragraph in this post, a change of the numbers from “on the whole” to “some members, some of the time” supports that the gist of the hypothesis deserves consideration, despite that I believe the original hypothesis is false.
Possibly a more succinct description of the issue under discussion is when an individuals self serving bias meets a groups group serving bias. The individual being an outsider.
When one considers that an aim of LW is the removal of biases, labelling a presentation of a possible group serving bias as a “troll” is not in the spirit—or vibe if you prefer—of LW. I do understand why one would want to not waste time on something as obviously false as the original hypothesis, yet I think that the updated hypothesis deserves consideration from members of the community.
What is quite interesting when reconsidering the original hypothesis of ABrook, is the taking into consideration of outsiders.
If outsiders strongly associate rationality with LW and LW is negatively perceived, then the original hypothesis has some weight.
Fortunately we have an outsider… that’s me, and,
I do have some negative perceptions of LW, yet more fortunately for rationality a negative perception of LW is that I do not strongly associate LW with rationality. I presume some will appreciate the beautiful irony of this construct and further appreciate and then avoid the infinite spirals it produces.