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on the one hand, it is a desirable feature of an intellectual community to be truth seeking, and while it can be deeply emotionally painful to part ways with deeply held beliefs, in the long run it's better to tear off the bandage. on the other hand, being emotionally hurt all the time by your community kind of fucking sucks, and isn't very good for long term emotional or epistemic health.
perhaps a middle ground is in order: intellectual communities should be partitioned into an arena, where every idea is to be exposed to the harsh light of truth, and an antechamber, where you can rest and be surrounded by positivity and develop ideas in a supportive environment.
both are necessary - we need a way to kill bad ideas, because an environment that refuses to discard bad ideas because they are emotionally load bearing is doomed to epistemic ruin. but also the best weird ideas often sound bad initially, and require a safe environment to develop; and we are all human, and our emotional well being and desire to belong to a community is essential. by visibly separating the two, we might be able to get the best of both worlds.
this is not a crazy idea - many other parts of society have analogous things. for example, people who play sports for fun with their friends compete to win while on the field, but this only brings them closer off the field.
I think one common criticism of LW ist it is too much of an arena, and not enough of an antechamber. perhaps this can be fixed somehow.
Said Achmiz was one person who claimed as such, and he tended to get a bunch of agreement votes when he said so, so presumably some people agreed with him.
I don't quite think so? My impression is the criticism is that LW is too much of an echochamber, in that people just express agreement with each other too much but probably that is mostly not because of people being nice but folks just outright having very similar believes
12Vladimir_Nesov
Consider cults (including milder things like weird "alternative" health advice groups etc.). Positivity and mutual support seem like a key element of their architecture, and adversity often primarily comes from peers rather than an outgroup. I'm not talking about isolated beliefs, content and motivations for those tend to be far more legible. A lot of belief memeplexes have either too few followers or aren't distinct enough from all the other nonsense to be explicitly labeled as cults or ideologies, or to be organized, but you generally can't argue their members out of alignment with the group (on relevant beliefs, considered altogether).
[...]
This is also a standard piece of anti-epistemic machinery of groups that reinforce some nonsense memplex among themselves with support and positivity. Support and positivity are great, but directing them to systematically taboo correctness-fixing activity is what I'm gesturing at, the sort of "kindness" that by its intent and nature tends to trade off against correctness.