> it is hard to find a place where independent thought is so unwelcome.
Is that actually true, though? It's true that a higher fraction of the people in that community give credence to the intelligence explosion hypothesis than pretty much anywhere else. (This is what one would expect, since part of the purpose of LessWrong is to be a forum for discussions about super-intelligent AI.) But even if the intelligence explosion is a terrible, absolutely-wrong theory, that doesn't prevent the people who hold it from being open-minded and tolerant of independent thought. Willingness to consider new and different ideas is something the LessWrong community claims to value, so it would be a little bit weird if they were doing way worse than average at it. And AFAICT, it seems like they're doing fine. Some examples:
- Here [1] is a post critical of the intelligence explosion theory. It has 81 upvotes as of this writing, and the highest upvoted comment goes like: "thanks for writing this post, it makes a lot of good arguments. I agree with these things you wrote" (list of things) "here are some points where I disagree" (list of things). This may even be the original post you were talking about in your comment, except that it doesn't start with an apology.
- LW has 2 different kinds of voting: "Regular upvotes" provide an indication of the quality of a post or comment, and "agree/disagree votes" let people express how much they agree or disagree with a particular comment. Down-voting a high quality comment just because you disagree (instead of giving it a disagree-vote) would be against the culture on LW.
If you're already sure that LW is wrong about superintelligence, and you're trying to explain how they became wrong, then "those LW people were too open minded and fell for that intelligence explosion BS" makes more sense to me than anything about suppression of independent thought.
Is that actually true, though? It's true that a higher fraction of the people in that community give credence to the intelligence explosion hypothesis than pretty much anywhere else. (This is what one would expect, since part of the purpose of LessWrong is to be a forum for discussions about super-intelligent AI.) But even if the intelligence explosion is a terrible, absolutely-wrong theory, that doesn't prevent the people who hold it from being open-minded and tolerant of independent thought. Willingness to consider new and different ideas is something the LessWrong community claims to value, so it would be a little bit weird if they were doing way worse than average at it. And AFAICT, it seems like they're doing fine. Some examples:
- Here [1] is a post critical of the intelligence explosion theory. It has 81 upvotes as of this writing, and the highest upvoted comment goes like: "thanks for writing this post, it makes a lot of good arguments. I agree with these things you wrote" (list of things) "here are some points where I disagree" (list of things). This may even be the original post you were talking about in your comment, except that it doesn't start with an apology.
- LW has 2 different kinds of voting: "Regular upvotes" provide an indication of the quality of a post or comment, and "agree/disagree votes" let people express how much they agree or disagree with a particular comment. Down-voting a high quality comment just because you disagree (instead of giving it a disagree-vote) would be against the culture on LW.
If you're already sure that LW is wrong about superintelligence, and you're trying to explain how they became wrong, then "those LW people were too open minded and fell for that intelligence explosion BS" makes more sense to me than anything about suppression of independent thought.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zB3ukZJqt3pQDw9jz/ai-will-ch...