With all respect that I’m generically required to give, I don’t care whether you care or not. The argument I made was handling what you posted/quoted, neither you as a person nor your motives to posting.
That is a hugely unfair assessment of my motives (unlike abody97′s comment which claims not to be about my motives, which I also doubt). People say untrue things all the time, e.g. when storytelling. The goal of storytelling is not to directly relate the truth of some particular experience, and I didn’t think the goal of posting rationality quotes was either, considering how many quotes these posts get from various works of fiction. I posted this quote for no reason other than to suggest an interesting rationality lesson, and calling that “bullshit” sneaks in unnecessary connotations.
Yes, but that quote is written in such a way that most readers¹ would assume it’s true (or at least that the writer believes it’s true); so it’s not like storytelling. And most readers¹ would find it interesting because they’d think it’s true; if I pulled some claim about $natural_language having $weird_feature directly out of my ass and concluded with “… Just kidding.”, I doubt many people¹ would find it that interesting.
OK, I admit I’m mostly Generalizing From One Example.
Would you be satisfied if I edited the original post to read something like “note: I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson either way. Feel free to substitute ‘Zorblaxians’ for ‘Japanese’”?
I don’t care whether it’s actually true or not; either way it still holds an interesting rationality lesson and that’s why I posted it.
With all respect that I’m generically required to give, I don’t care whether you care or not. The argument I made was handling what you posted/quoted, neither you as a person nor your motives to posting.
I think the technical term for that is “bullshit”.
That is a hugely unfair assessment of my motives (unlike abody97′s comment which claims not to be about my motives, which I also doubt). People say untrue things all the time, e.g. when storytelling. The goal of storytelling is not to directly relate the truth of some particular experience, and I didn’t think the goal of posting rationality quotes was either, considering how many quotes these posts get from various works of fiction. I posted this quote for no reason other than to suggest an interesting rationality lesson, and calling that “bullshit” sneaks in unnecessary connotations.
Yes, but that quote is written in such a way that most readers¹ would assume it’s true (or at least that the writer believes it’s true); so it’s not like storytelling. And most readers¹ would find it interesting because they’d think it’s true; if I pulled some claim about $natural_language having $weird_feature directly out of my ass and concluded with “… Just kidding.”, I doubt many people¹ would find it that interesting.
OK, I admit I’m mostly Generalizing From One Example.
Would you be satisfied if I edited the original post to read something like “note: I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson either way. Feel free to substitute ‘Zorblaxians’ for ‘Japanese’”?
Yes.