I haven’t meant it as a dilemma “mutual admiration society” vs. “indiscriminate battle against wrongness”, that would hardly make sense. I am even not really afraid of becoming mutual admiration society or cult or something like.
I only intended to ask a question (more or less unrelated to the original discussion): how reliably do we know that the s/n ratio is really high? There is a lot of room for bias here, since “this is an exceptionally rational community” is what we like to hear, while people with different opinion aren’t heard: why would they participate in a rationalist community, if they thought it weren’t so much rational after all? Put in another way, any community which values rationality—independently on how do they define it and whether they really meet their needs—is likely to produce such self-assuring statements.
So when I hear about how LW is great, I am a little bit worried that my (and everybody else’s) agreement may be biased. As always, a good thing would be to have either an independent judge, or a set of objective criteria and tests. That could also help to determine whether the LW standards are improving or deteriorating in time.
I haven’t meant it as a dilemma “mutual admiration society” vs. “indiscriminate battle against wrongness”, that would hardly make sense. I am even not really afraid of becoming mutual admiration society or cult or something like.
I only intended to ask a question (more or less unrelated to the original discussion): how reliably do we know that the s/n ratio is really high? There is a lot of room for bias here, since “this is an exceptionally rational community” is what we like to hear, while people with different opinion aren’t heard: why would they participate in a rationalist community, if they thought it weren’t so much rational after all? Put in another way, any community which values rationality—independently on how do they define it and whether they really meet their needs—is likely to produce such self-assuring statements.
So when I hear about how LW is great, I am a little bit worried that my (and everybody else’s) agreement may be biased. As always, a good thing would be to have either an independent judge, or a set of objective criteria and tests. That could also help to determine whether the LW standards are improving or deteriorating in time.