Implied in your so called ‘question’ is the statement that any online community that you know of (I shouldn’t assume you know of 0 other communities, right?), you deemed less rational than lesswrong. I would say lesswrong is substantially less rational than average, i.e. if you pick a community at random, it is typically more rational than lesswrong. You can choose any place better than average—physicsforums, gamedev.net, stackexchange, arstechnica observatory, and so on, those are all more rational than LW. But of course, implied in your question is that you won’t accept this answer. The LW is rather interested in AI, and the talk about AI here is significantly less rational than talk of almost any technical topic in almost any community of people with technical interest. You would have to go to some alternative energy forums or ufo or conspiracy theorist place to find a match in terms of irrationality of the discussion of the topics of interest.
You would have no problem what so ever finding and joining a more rational place, if you were looking for one. That is why your ‘question’ is in fact almost purely rhetorical (or you are looking for a place that is more ‘foo’ than lesswrong, where you use word ‘rationality’ in place of ‘foo’).
physicsforums, gamedev.net, stackexchange, arstechnica observatory, and so on, those are all more rational than LW.
Can you list some specific examples of irrational thinking patterns that occur on LessWrong but not on those communities? The one guess I can make is that they’re all technical-sounding, in which case they might exist in the context of a discipline that has lots of well-defined rules and methods for testing success, and so less “bullshit” gets through because it obviously violates the rules of X-technical-discipline. Is this what you mean, or is it something else entirely?
I see, I had taken your earlier comment (the one I originally replied to) as saying that lesswrong was above average but there were even more rational people elsewhere (otherwise I probably wouldn’t have bothered to reply). But since we’re already talking, if you actually think it’s below average, what are you hoping to accomplish by participating here?
The rationality and intelligence are not precisely same thing. You can pick e.g. those anti vaccination campaigners whom have measured IQ >120, and put them in a room, and call that a very intelligent community, that can discuss a variety of topics besides the vaccines. Then you will get some less insane people whom are interested in safety of vaccines coming in and getting terribly misinformed, which just is not a good thing. You can do that with almost any belief, especially using the internet to be able to get the cases from the pool of a billion or so.
Implied in your so called ‘question’ is the statement that any online community that you know of (I shouldn’t assume you know of 0 other communities, right?), you deemed less rational than lesswrong. I would say lesswrong is substantially less rational than average, i.e. if you pick a community at random, it is typically more rational than lesswrong. You can choose any place better than average—physicsforums, gamedev.net, stackexchange, arstechnica observatory, and so on, those are all more rational than LW. But of course, implied in your question is that you won’t accept this answer. The LW is rather interested in AI, and the talk about AI here is significantly less rational than talk of almost any technical topic in almost any community of people with technical interest. You would have to go to some alternative energy forums or ufo or conspiracy theorist place to find a match in terms of irrationality of the discussion of the topics of interest.
You would have no problem what so ever finding and joining a more rational place, if you were looking for one. That is why your ‘question’ is in fact almost purely rhetorical (or you are looking for a place that is more ‘foo’ than lesswrong, where you use word ‘rationality’ in place of ‘foo’).
Can you list some specific examples of irrational thinking patterns that occur on LessWrong but not on those communities? The one guess I can make is that they’re all technical-sounding, in which case they might exist in the context of a discipline that has lots of well-defined rules and methods for testing success, and so less “bullshit” gets through because it obviously violates the rules of X-technical-discipline. Is this what you mean, or is it something else entirely?
I see, I had taken your earlier comment (the one I originally replied to) as saying that lesswrong was above average but there were even more rational people elsewhere (otherwise I probably wouldn’t have bothered to reply). But since we’re already talking, if you actually think it’s below average, what are you hoping to accomplish by participating here?
The rationality and intelligence are not precisely same thing. You can pick e.g. those anti vaccination campaigners whom have measured IQ >120, and put them in a room, and call that a very intelligent community, that can discuss a variety of topics besides the vaccines. Then you will get some less insane people whom are interested in safety of vaccines coming in and getting terribly misinformed, which just is not a good thing. You can do that with almost any belief, especially using the internet to be able to get the cases from the pool of a billion or so.