I think when assessing lesswrong it is important to think of posts and their comments as a single entity. Many of the objections to the posts that you mention are also brought up in the comment sections, often themselves highly upvoted (in the first example the comment has 1 more karma than the post).
If you take upvotes to mean you are glad something was posted then I don’t think it is inconsistent to upvote something you think contains an error. Therefore high karma alone shouldn’t be enough to consider something to have been considered correct by the LW community, just that it has some value. If there are also no/only minor critical comments then I think that is much stronger evidence.
I don’t think this completely exonerates LW but I think it means the picture is not quite as bleak as it would first appear.
(Edited to add: As an example I upvoted this post despite this comment as I think this is an important kind of thing to look at and agree that my frame of mind can be important in how I read content)
This fits with my depiction of LW as a sort of serious-minded scholarly fanfic community.
I think it can be valuable to read the post alone, write down your reaction to it, and only then examine the comments. If somebody else made the same critique as you, it’s a bit like pre-registering an experiment. You can have more confidence that you’re doing your own thinking, and that you’re converging on the truth. Perhaps this is a way to get out of the “I can only produce rationalizations” dilemma.
I think I didn’t get the fanfic analogy at first. Could I summarise it as “Lesswrong is to scholarship as serious fanfic is to original novels”?
I know the LW team have spoken about a level above curated which would be intended to be more on the level of scholarship. I think the 2018 review was designed to serve this purpose so we should hope that these posts in particular don’t contain any glaring errors!
I think it’s super valuable to be able to be able to put imperfect ideas out there (I see one of the 2018 review top posts was Babble!) but thinking about this has really emphasised to me how useful epistemic statuses are.
To your second paragraph—yes, definitely this! When I do this it definitely gets me out of the habit of passive reading.
As another example, when I get into a debate with someone in the comments section, I tend to upvote the other person’s comments as long as they’re reasonably well-thought-out and well-written.
I think when assessing lesswrong it is important to think of posts and their comments as a single entity. Many of the objections to the posts that you mention are also brought up in the comment sections, often themselves highly upvoted (in the first example the comment has 1 more karma than the post).
If you take upvotes to mean you are glad something was posted then I don’t think it is inconsistent to upvote something you think contains an error. Therefore high karma alone shouldn’t be enough to consider something to have been considered correct by the LW community, just that it has some value. If there are also no/only minor critical comments then I think that is much stronger evidence.
I don’t think this completely exonerates LW but I think it means the picture is not quite as bleak as it would first appear.
(Edited to add: As an example I upvoted this post despite this comment as I think this is an important kind of thing to look at and agree that my frame of mind can be important in how I read content)
This fits with my depiction of LW as a sort of serious-minded scholarly fanfic community.
I think it can be valuable to read the post alone, write down your reaction to it, and only then examine the comments. If somebody else made the same critique as you, it’s a bit like pre-registering an experiment. You can have more confidence that you’re doing your own thinking, and that you’re converging on the truth. Perhaps this is a way to get out of the “I can only produce rationalizations” dilemma.
I think I didn’t get the fanfic analogy at first. Could I summarise it as “Lesswrong is to scholarship as serious fanfic is to original novels”?
I know the LW team have spoken about a level above curated which would be intended to be more on the level of scholarship. I think the 2018 review was designed to serve this purpose so we should hope that these posts in particular don’t contain any glaring errors!
I think it’s super valuable to be able to be able to put imperfect ideas out there (I see one of the 2018 review top posts was Babble!) but thinking about this has really emphasised to me how useful epistemic statuses are.
To your second paragraph—yes, definitely this! When I do this it definitely gets me out of the habit of passive reading.
As another example, when I get into a debate with someone in the comments section, I tend to upvote the other person’s comments as long as they’re reasonably well-thought-out and well-written.