More wrong would be better

People can be more or less intelligent, and more or less rational.

Now, it is not unusual for an unintelligent person to be irrational.

Neither does it, I think, surprise any of us to see an intelligent person being rational.

It also happens, and there are even books written about it, that an intelligent person is irrational.

I have, however, never spent much thought on the fourth possibility – a person who is unintelligent and rational.

That was until recently – until I found the website LessWrong. You really should take a look at it if you are curious to see what happens when you combine extreme rationalism with low intelligence.

Take the website's structure. I have no doubt that it's based on strict and prefectly logical rules. Somehow, though, they don't seem to have spent much thought on the intuitiveness of use (which is to be expected – after all their self-declared purpose is to be as rational as possible). The result is a website as confusing [I actually meant what's called unübersichtlich in German; amazingly, there seems to be no such word in English, so maybe I'm doing the website injustice, maybe the English-speaking peoples simply don't have the concept. :-)) ] as a database of EU legislation. It's just hell of a lot of effort to even understand what the fuck it's all about, let alone find anything specific you are looking for.

That, though, is a very minor problem, compared to the website's contents. Now, it is perfectly understandable that some people find it interesting and educating to discuss advanced mathematical problems like the Two Envelopes Problem. However, to the most part, the writers on that website seem to be dedicated to posing meaningless questions, discussing them in great detail and creating elaborate systems which don't seem to have any relevance to anything that occurs in the real life (or at least the authors don't seem to be concerned about it much). It's quite rational all right – as well as quite nonsensical.

An example. One wiseguy boasted how he has an algorithm for solving any kind of a problem in the world. It sounded interesting enough to wade through his rather uninteresting prose. He went through the various steps of creating an algorithm and eventually ended up describing... the Turing Machine. Sure enough, it was all theoretically correct. The Turing Machine is indeed believed to be capable of solving any possible algorithm. Unfortunately, as anyone who has studied informatics at the university knows, the Turing Machine is an extremely inefficient way to compute anything, and if you put it to work in real life, the more complicated problems might take you many human lifetimes to solve. The Turing Machine has a certain useful purpose in theoretical informatics, but trying to use it in practice is equivalent to building a huge staircase to study the clouds – it might even work but it's  hugely inefficient compared to other available methods. That, though, was obviously of no concern to the author. I didn't bother to read the second half of the article which looked just as boring as the first part. 

I was just utterly amazed at a person being so stupid as to so pompously offer a solution which is so obviously unusable for any practical purpose.

Well, I quickly found out that pretty much the entire website was like that. They would start with something as deep and profound as:

"I felt like scratching my ass, and began to wonder if I should do it with my left hand or with my right hand. Would Cumpleet-Dikhed's Problem Solving System provide the answer to this faster than Godwataphuhl's Reasonable Creativity Tool?" or

"Is spitting on the ground in front of other people more evil than spitting out of the window without knowing where your spit will land? Is this question of any importance in the context of Mauron de Retar's Morality Hierarchy, and what rational method can we use in order to find out for sure whether or not it is?"

"If you twisted randomly a number of red paperclips and blue paperclips and the red paperclips broke, on average, more quickly than the blue paperclips, would that mean that the world is imperfect or that your perception is imperfect?"

Then they would elaborate it into an overlong article, tedious as Kant and pointless as Nietzsche, although, mind you, quite rational, with constant referrals to other similar "works".

It's been a truly amazing experience. I've never seen anything like it. Naive as I am, I am still probing them with occasional comments, trying to find at least one intelligent person. Unfortunately, everything I've seen so far on that website is just one huge WTF.

Less wrong, surely. Because if you don't say anything that has any relevance to anything that matters to anybody, you can hardly be wrong. And you guys are well on your way just there.