[robinh]

"I've always been a fan of Tesla, SpaceX, and Musk, but I will never look at him in the same way again."

I felt the same way, and that's why I think it is appropriate to link to the following post:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/31i/have_no_heroes_and_no_villains/

(There are some valid criticisms of LessWrong and EY, but none of the problems really concern the above post, which is simply an excellent piece.)

What we're seeing here is that kind of thing happening.

[tunesmith]

Off-topic, but what sort of valid criticisms of lesswrong and ey have you seen? I'm not aware of any discussion about that community other than at that community itself. Just curious if there are any links/summaries.

[wamatt]

I've found Less Wrong to be somewhat useful and interesting community, and I've made some friends over the past year at a few of the meetups in the Bay Area.

That said, it's possibly slightly ironic that many (perhaps even the majority) of the LW members, (in my personal experience) seem to naturally posses low levels of instrumental rationality, and tend to be unusually self-unaware of their own feelings and unconscious motivations.

Another way to say this: "common sense" is not something (in my experience), that is respected, understood or utilized in spades within the community.

Furthermore, while there are criticisms of LW out there, I agree with Aaron Swartz's central claim[1] about a lack of skepticism. While I'm a huge advocate of Bayes theorem, I would be wary of calling myself a "Bayesian", or other self-reinforcing label. Although calibrated belief networks (eg BBN's)[2] are powerful, they can also fall prone to delusional outputs where there exists a lack of sufficient external feedback.

Much of the rhetoric focuses around the charismatic and arguably pompous (don't mean to sound harsh) character of Eliezer Yudkowsky. IMHO this is considerably more evident, than the level to which HN centers around PG, for example. As for LW, further comparison's have been made to a cult before. [3][4]

In addition, and this is more a personal quibble, there seems to be an inclination towards debate vs dialectic. But that's probably true of nearly any community out there. HTH.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/atm/cult_impressions_of_less_wrongsi...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network

[3] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13018494520A...

[4] http://kruel.co/2012/07/29/possible-reasons-for-a-perception...

[tunesmith]

That's a good summary, thanks. I know that with myself, I have a side interest in analyzing communication patterns (and argument patterns) in others - communities in particular. So I start getting analytical and looking at things in terms of rationality and bias. But I find that it might be making me slow down in my personal life - meaning, I start to arrive at things methodically and analytically that could be arrived at much quicker through intuition and common sense. It's frustrating. So I'm not sure it's just ironic - it might even be causal.

[jimwhitson]

Here's an example, but it's hardly scholarly: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong.

You're right that it doesn't get discussed much, I think largely because the explanatory material is dense and rather turgid, so would-be critics don't get far enough to make meaningful criticisms; that's certainly the case for me.

[steveklabnik]

I was reading http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk earlier today, and while I don't know that much about EY, LessWrong, and the institute, it was... yeah.

[networked]

A somewhat in-depth discussion of the basilisk can be found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/17y819/lw_uncenso.... Read at your own (possible) risk.

[tunesmith]

Safe to read if you don't subscribe to utilitarianism. :-)