Sure, not everyone likes curated gardens. If that’s not the kind of site you want, there’s other places. Reddit, for example, has active communities that operate under different norms.
The folks who started the Forum prefer the sort of structure it has. If you want something else and you don’t have a convincing argument that convinces us, you’re free to participate in discussions elsewhere.
‘There are other places’ seems like a terrible benchmark to judge by. Reddit is basically the only other active forum on the internet for EA discussion and nowhere else has any chance of materially affecting EA culture. The existence of this place suppresses alternatives—I used to run a utilitarianism forum that basically folded into this because it didn’t seem sensible at the time to compete with people we almost totally agreed with.
Posting a a single unevidenced LW argument as though it were scripture as an argument against being exposed to a wider range of opinions seems like a poor epistemic practice. In any case, that thread is about banning, which I’ve become more sympathetic to, and which is totally unrelated to the karma system.
Sure, not everyone likes curated gardens. If that’s not the kind of site you want, there’s other places. Reddit, for example, has active communities that operate under different norms.
The folks who started the Forum prefer the sort of structure it has. If you want something else and you don’t have a convincing argument that convinces us, you’re free to participate in discussions elsewhere.
As to deeper reasons why the Forum is the way it is, see, for example, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
‘There are other places’ seems like a terrible benchmark to judge by. Reddit is basically the only other active forum on the internet for EA discussion and nowhere else has any chance of materially affecting EA culture. The existence of this place suppresses alternatives—I used to run a utilitarianism forum that basically folded into this because it didn’t seem sensible at the time to compete with people we almost totally agreed with.
Posting a a single unevidenced LW argument as though it were scripture as an argument against being exposed to a wider range of opinions seems like a poor epistemic practice. In any case, that thread is about banning, which I’ve become more sympathetic to, and which is totally unrelated to the karma system.