To me, this sounds way too ambitious for a place that advertises itself as a public forum
contradicts the other part:
a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what’s readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues
so I’m not sure that your well-worded and well-upvoted comment even has a point I could respond to. Anyway. The politically charged discussions here have been useless to me (with one exception that sadly didn’t get the follow-through it deserved), so I’ll go on waiting for insight, and avoid talking when I have no insight, and encourage others to do the same.
The comment definitely wasn’t well-worded if it seems like there’s a contradiction there; in fact, my failure to convey the point suggests that the wording was quite awful. (Thus providing more evidence that people are way too generous with upvoting.) So please let me try once more.
I was trying to draw a contrast between the following:
Topics in math and hard science, in which any insight that can’t be found by looking up the existing literature is extremely hard to come by. It seems to me that a public web forum that invites random visitors to participate freely is, as a community, inherently unusable for achieving any such goal. What is required is a closely-knit group of dedicated researchers that imposes extremely high qualifications for joining and whose internal discussions will be largely incomprehensible to outsiders, the only exception being the work of lone geniuses.
Topics in softer fields, in which the present state of knowledge is not in the form of well-organized literature that is almost fully sound and extremely hard to improve on, but instead even the very basics are heavily muddled and biased. Here, in contrast, there is plenty of opportunity to achieve some new insight or at least to make some sense out of the existing muddled and contradictory information, even by casual amateurs, if the topics are just approached with a good epistemology and a clear and unbiased mind.
Of course, a web forum can serve for all other kinds of fun chit-chat and exchange of useful information, but when it comes to generating novel insight, that’s basically it.
Or do you really find it within the realm of the possible that a public forum that gets its membership by warmly inviting random readers might be up to standard for advancing the state of knowledge in some hard area?
Thanks, I understand your point now. It seems my original comment was unclear: I didn’t mean to demand that everyone shut up about soft topics. RobinZ expressed the intended meaning.
It seems my original comment was unclear: I didn’t mean to demand that everyone shut up about soft topics.
For what that’s worth, I didn’t understand your comment that way. I merely wanted to point out the inherent tension between the public and inviting nature of the forum and your vision of the goals it should ideally achieve.
What kind of follow-through do you think my post deserved? I’m pretty happy with the effect that it’s had on the LW community myself. People do seem to be more careful about giving and taking offense after that post. So I’m curious what you have in mind.
I hoped for more of the kind of analysis you demonstrated. Of course I don’t know what specific advances would happen! But I feel you were doing something methodologically right when writing that post, and the same approach could be applied to other problems.
This part:
contradicts the other part:
so I’m not sure that your well-worded and well-upvoted comment even has a point I could respond to. Anyway. The politically charged discussions here have been useless to me (with one exception that sadly didn’t get the follow-through it deserved), so I’ll go on waiting for insight, and avoid talking when I have no insight, and encourage others to do the same.
The comment definitely wasn’t well-worded if it seems like there’s a contradiction there; in fact, my failure to convey the point suggests that the wording was quite awful. (Thus providing more evidence that people are way too generous with upvoting.) So please let me try once more.
I was trying to draw a contrast between the following:
Topics in math and hard science, in which any insight that can’t be found by looking up the existing literature is extremely hard to come by. It seems to me that a public web forum that invites random visitors to participate freely is, as a community, inherently unusable for achieving any such goal. What is required is a closely-knit group of dedicated researchers that imposes extremely high qualifications for joining and whose internal discussions will be largely incomprehensible to outsiders, the only exception being the work of lone geniuses.
Topics in softer fields, in which the present state of knowledge is not in the form of well-organized literature that is almost fully sound and extremely hard to improve on, but instead even the very basics are heavily muddled and biased. Here, in contrast, there is plenty of opportunity to achieve some new insight or at least to make some sense out of the existing muddled and contradictory information, even by casual amateurs, if the topics are just approached with a good epistemology and a clear and unbiased mind.
Of course, a web forum can serve for all other kinds of fun chit-chat and exchange of useful information, but when it comes to generating novel insight, that’s basically it.
Or do you really find it within the realm of the possible that a public forum that gets its membership by warmly inviting random readers might be up to standard for advancing the state of knowledge in some hard area?
Thanks, I understand your point now. It seems my original comment was unclear: I didn’t mean to demand that everyone shut up about soft topics. RobinZ expressed the intended meaning.
cousin_it:
For what that’s worth, I didn’t understand your comment that way. I merely wanted to point out the inherent tension between the public and inviting nature of the forum and your vision of the goals it should ideally achieve.
What kind of follow-through do you think my post deserved? I’m pretty happy with the effect that it’s had on the LW community myself. People do seem to be more careful about giving and taking offense after that post. So I’m curious what you have in mind.
I hoped for more of the kind of analysis you demonstrated. Of course I don’t know what specific advances would happen! But I feel you were doing something methodologically right when writing that post, and the same approach could be applied to other problems.