To address the point behind the parody, the main difference between this and the analogous argument with “SIAI researcher”, besides user:Incorrect’s point and the fact that not being convinced is almost never automatically equated with motivated skepticism, is that the links to the blog posts don’t work. When they do, I don’t think the practice of linking to blog posts is problematic at all. It reduces the need to repeat arguments, and centralizes discussion of a particular issue to the comments of the corresponding post, instead of it being all over the place. Your dialog also gives the impression that you can find a post from the LW archives to support “anything”, that the linked post usually appears as incomprehensible and seemingly unrelated as a bunch of random digits, and that the act of giving someone a link to a relevant blog post is mainly a way to confuse and intimidate them with authority and the point is never for them to actually read it. Each of these impressions is false, as far as I can tell.
To address the point behind the parody, the main difference between this and the analogous argument with “SIAI researcher”, besides user:Incorrect’s point and the fact that not being convinced is almost never automatically equated with motivated skepticism, is that the links to the blog posts don’t work. When they do, I don’t think the practice of linking to blog posts is problematic at all. It reduces the need to repeat arguments, and centralizes discussion of a particular issue to the comments of the corresponding post, instead of it being all over the place. Your dialog also gives the impression that you can find a post from the LW archives to support “anything”, that the linked post usually appears as incomprehensible and seemingly unrelated as a bunch of random digits, and that the act of giving someone a link to a relevant blog post is mainly a way to confuse and intimidate them with authority and the point is never for them to actually read it. Each of these impressions is false, as far as I can tell.