7:15pm September 11, 2014

➸ My #1 red flag about LW.

youneedacat:

At least, the #1 red flag I’m able to coherently articulate, and that I completely forgot to mention earlier.

They basically take any mental system you have that is capable of showing you what is going badly wrong in their organization, that is capable of showing you actual danger signs, that is…

Mine was…so I went and googled the page yesterday after I read the question from the anon to you. And the first thing that struck me was, what that person said the page was for/about (place for neurodivergent people to discuss unpopular ideas), was not what the page itself said it was for/about (place to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to fix your thinking). So much so that I doubted that the top Google results were the ones I was looking for, because the description of the page given so didn’t match up with what your anon said the purpose of the page was.

And granted, those two aims probably aren’t mutually exclusive in all instances, but the way they were conflated like that was unsettling.

I think that people who actually like the place, get extremely defensive about criticism of LW sometimes. And then they will describe it in whatever way makes it sound the best, so that you can’t argue with its existence. So, to this person, it’s invaluable because it’s a place where neurodivergent people can go and discuss certain kinds of ideas. Which… it is. But that’s not what it's for, and there are plenty of much less disturbing places neurodivergent people can go, and plenty of places much more welcoming to a wider range of neurodivergent people, and so on. Honestly LW strikes me as like all the worst attributes of a gifted program, grown up, and that alone is enough to make me not want much part of it even if it didn’t have all the other red flags. Of course, if it was just a personal preference, I would simply avoid it, rather than periodically actively warning people about it.

Unfortunately my warnings carry very little weight with the people most likely to be caught up in it. The types of thinking that allow me to see what is wrong with LW, are types of thinking that I have seen discouraged, mocked, and disparaged among LW members more than I have ever seen them seriously discussed. And when I have seen them seriously discussed, I’ve seen them discussed as types of thinking that, while they may have uses (and often those uses are described in very trivializing ways, like they’re grudgingly admitting that uses exist for these forms of thought but they’re definitely “lower” forms of thought, as it were), certainly shouldn’t be used to make decisions about things like whether LW is legit or the Singularity is possible. So most people who already have a strong ability to think like I do are already staying away, and people whose ability to think that way is not so strong are getting sucked in and having their ability to think this way weakened even further, at the exact same time.

By the way, they don’t actually encourage rational thinking. They encourage something I’d call hyper-rationality, but even so… it’s not rational thought, it’s not logical thought, and it’s not accurate thought. The dangerous thing is that they have just enough little nuggets of truth thrown in that you can see yourself finding “Oh wow, this actually works!” now and again, with some idea that they’ve thrown into the mix. (And they have so many ideas, from so many sources, that some of them are bound to be right.) So then you start thinking that their entire method for thinking ‘rationally’ actually works, when it’s more like there’s a few nuggets of truth thrown in, or the proverbial stopped clock being right twice a day, and stuff like that. It doesn’t help that they spend all this time talking mostly to each other about it and reinforcing to each other the idea that all of this stuff works and is real, regardless of whether it is or not.

The problem is I’m not the sort of person most of them would consider a reliable observer of just about anything, let alone rationality. So I don’t often get into these conversations about what’s wrong with LW, because I know that eventually what happens is someone will come up to me and start interrogating me LW-fashion and deciding that if I can’t perform then I’m useless as a source of information. And aside from the headache that always results in, it’s kind of humiliating too.

Notes: