| 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... |