as small as a world and as large as alone, LessWrong is a place for a lot of weird...

1:27pm September 10, 2014

Anonymous asked: LessWrong is a place for a lot of weird neurodivergent people who have ideas that will get them shunned anywhere else and who want a place to talk with each other. It's okay that you really don't like our community. It's okay that it doesn't feel like a good place for you. But I really wish it wasn't so widespread on tumblr for people to go around saying 'wow those LessWrongers are backwards and dangerous' because we're weird people who aren't bothering anyone and just trying to live our lives.

I just want to clarify, when you say you ‘don’t like anything about them’ (LessWrongers) are you saying you think we’re bad people or we shouldn’t have our community or that you wouldn’t want us following you and admiring your writing (because it would make me really sad but I will unfollow you if you dislike everything about me such that it makes you uncomfortable to have me following you), or just that it’s not a good community for you personally?

I am trying not to make assumptions about what you mean because I have witnessed how upsetting to you it is when people misinterpret things you say as personal attacks. I do not want to do that. I am really sorry if I am doing that. but 'I really, really don’t like anything about them’ and 'backwards and dangerous’ does sort of read like you mean that you don’t like us and that you think we are dangerous

I think your ideas are dangerous. And not specifically your particular ideas as one particular person, but the ideas that get thought up at LessWrong in general. It’s not personal. It’s not about you being a bad person, unless you’re one of the ones who really is in the know about what some of those ideas are doing and what they have been built to do – in which case, yes you are. But you don’t sound like you’re in the know about that, so I’ll assume you’re not.

Okay so I got a series of asks about my opinion of Less Wrong. I do think it’s a dangerous site, and that the most dangerous ideas there are designed to bypass and even take advantage of the prejudices and biases of neurodivergent intellectuals. It’s not my job to explain to anyone how this works. I didn’t create it, I just noticed it, and so have a lot of other people who are not in the target demographic and therefore have the ability to see through it a bit.

That said, I can’t see at all how anyone gets from my total mistrust in the place, to the idea that nobody from there should follow me or use my ideas in any way. I don’t much care if you are from there or not. The friend I’ve had for the longest in the world is pretty high up in their group’s hierarchy, another long-time friend hangs around their fringes.

But I don’t trust anything about their ideas, their ideologies, or their methods. I refuse to learn their jargon and I refuse to have conversations in which their jargon is a prominent part of the conversation. I think the idea that they know anything about logical thinking is both laughable and depressing at the same time. Same with the idea that they know anything about the future of computing.

And I have no intention of being singled out here. My viewpoints on this are not unique. Everyone I know with a strong ‘sensing’ orientation to their thinking, has a strong instinct saying this place is dangerous, these ideas are dangerous, and many of these people are dangerous.

I think there are people there who are willfully dangerous — they know perfectly well what they are doing. I also think there are people there who are true believers and do not think that what they are doing is dangerous, nor do they see the danger in what they are doing. And then there’s a lot of people who just casually hang out there and also don’t see the dangers.

I can’t tell you what the dangers are. I can only tell you that they exist. They are snares hidden in the thought patterns that are taught to people on the Less Wrong site and in other places where they purport to teach rationality and logic. And they are other things that can only be sensed, and can’t be easily described to people who lack that capacity.

I am not telling anyone to stay away from me. I still have contact with my two friends who are involved to various degrees. (One is involved at about as high a level as it is possible to be involved at, the other just hangs around casually on the fringes and can barely be said to be involved at all.) But I will not have conversations where the premises from Less Wrong are in any way taken as fact, or where jargon from Less Wrong is used, because I have no desire to subject my brain to being ripped open and manipulated.

So yes — I think it’s horrible, and dangerous, and about as wrong as wrong can get. But that doesn’t mean I think people who hang out there are worthless or are people I shouldn’t be around. Some of them, certainly, are people I shouldn’t be around. And some are people I can only be around in certain carefully controlled situations. But that’s because of what the place does to people’s minds, and what exposure to those ideas does to my mind and the minds of people I care about. It’s not because I think that neurodivergent people shouldn’t have a place to test out their ideas or whatever.

In fact I think neurodivergent people should absolutely have a place like that, and that Less Wrong is not that place, should not be that place, and should not be advertised as such a place.

I did, at one point, attempt to engage with people there, by the way. Under a pseudonym so nobody would know who I was. It didn’t go well. It felt like being in a gifted program all over again, and if you’ve ever read my posts about being ex-gifted, you’ll know what that means to me. Any time I didn’t understand something, I was directed to read this gigantic tome of information written in impenetrable language. Even when I said “Hello, I have learning disabilities, I can’t do this,” I still got referred back to it.

And at any rate, it’s through my experiences directly trying to engage with people on the website, and also through seeing how it has changed people I know in ways I didn’t know they could be changed, that has allowed me to form my opinion on this. I didn’t just decide on a snap decision one day that this place was dangerous and that I should avoid it. I did my best to give it more of a chance than it frankly deserved.

I say more of a chance than it deserved, because my gut instincts about danger when it comes to places like that are extremely well-honed. If I sensed that a place was going to do to my brain what that place did, in fact, do to my brain, then I should have left immediately. The fact that I did not leave immediately was because a close childhood friend of mine is heavily involved in it, and is what I would consider a true believer, she does not know the dangers, and is not hurting anyone on purpose. I wanted to know what she saw in it. Unfortunately I think I do know what she saw in it, which is a system of thought designed specifically to simultaneously appeal to and bypass the biases of a certain kind of intellectually-oriented person. I am not that kind of person, so I could see what was happening, and so can other people I know who are not that kind of person.

And when I say “that kind of person” it’s not an insult. There are groups out there that are just as tailored to my biases as Less Wrong is tailored to the biases of certain kinds of neurodivergent intellectuals. But it is tailored to specific biases, and it’s tailored to them in a way I find highly sinister.

But when I talk about these things, I’m talking about it as a group. I am not telling you as a person what to do, who to follow, who to talk to, or anything else. And I would be rather horrified at the idea that I should tell you any of those things. I’m just saying I don’t trust Less Wrong or the ideas formulated there further than I could spit a rat, and I have very good reasons for my mistrust even if I’m not able to articulate them.

And people from LW are always trying to get me to articulate them. No, not you, at least not yet. But they are always trying to get me to break it down into chunks in a way that reflects the kind of thinking they are being taught. Unfortunately the kind of insight it takes to see what’s wrong with Less Wrong can’t easily be broken down into chunks that way, and most people capable of noticing what’s wrong are also going to be people with language and communication problems. And are also going to be people that many people at LW tend to look down on as inferior thinkers at best.

Worse, I’m not capable of the kind of conversations that I’ve found people at LW tend to see as necessary to ferreting out the truth of things. Like there’s a very specific kind of conversation, that involves asking very specific kinds of questions – I’ve been engaged in it dozens of times with dozens of LW people. And I can’t have that kind of conversation, my brain is not geared to do it. And that simple fact, that I can’t even have the conversation, that I can't think in the way expected of an LW person, means people are unlikely to listen to what I have to say even when I’m capable of articulating it.

But mostly all I’m capable of articulating is that everything about LW, everything about it, from every angle I’ve ever approached it, sends off giant red flags and warning bells like I’ve never seen before. And also that when I look at the people most heavily involved in it, at the deepest levels, I see many disturbing patterns of connection and coercion and other things. But these are not things that can be analyzed LW-style so they don’t exist. And that’s the problem.

But no. You don’t have to stay away from me. You don’t have to unfollow me. You don’t have to not talk to me. I would request that you not try to engage me in conversations that involve a lot of LW jargon, but that’s largely because I can’t follow such conversations and they give me a headache.

Sometimes I think people take my opinions way too seriously.

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