What you did here (from my perspective) was to overtly signal your moral superiority to the rest of us, in a context that wasn’t devoted to this discussion.
It was not my intention to signal my moral superiority to members of this community, many of whom I highly respect both morally and intellectually. Instead, I wanted to reflect on the fact that “even a community built around the goal of overcoming bias—and composed of members abnormally smart and truth-oriented—can be quite blatantly biased towards certain classes of beings,” as I put it in a rejoinder to the original comment. I fully endorse what Kazuo Thow said in a (sympathetic) comment to David Pearce’s Facebook wall:
Rather than taking this as an opportunity to feel like I’m better than much of the LW community, I’ll instead reflect on ways that I could be doing that same kind of compartmentalization. Because if a whole community of people dedicated to rationality and self-improvement are suffering a belief-propagation-fail of that magnitude, I’m almost certainly missing something of comparable importance.
Of course, none of this was present in my original comment, so although I still believe a charitable reading of it should not have elicited such a hostile reaction, I am aware that I made things easier for those antecedently disinclined to reconsider their attitudes to non-human beings, by giving them an opportunity to dismiss my comments as coming from a self-righteous prig.
Well, unfortunately bad karma can sort of snowball on Less Wrong; when I see a comment in the negative numbers, I instinctively read it (and downthread comments) in a “possibly trolling” light. I’m not sure what might be a good fix for this.
Anyway, I think that people would have given it the benefit of the doubt had it not appeared in a meetup thread. It’s a general rule of etiquette that you don’t start an intellectual argument where people are trying to set up a social gathering- it throws a monkey wrench in the works. Thus, when someone violates the norm, the first assumption is that they’re intending to throw a monkey wrench.
(Yes, the beauty of threaded conversations is that something like this won’t necessarily derail the social gathering. But the norm exists, and while it does it’s smart to be aware of it.)
OK, this is enough meta discussion for me. I hope you make a top-level post so we can actually discuss the issues...
Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it.
It was not my intention to signal my moral superiority to members of this community, many of whom I highly respect both morally and intellectually. Instead, I wanted to reflect on the fact that “even a community built around the goal of overcoming bias—and composed of members abnormally smart and truth-oriented—can be quite blatantly biased towards certain classes of beings,” as I put it in a rejoinder to the original comment. I fully endorse what Kazuo Thow said in a (sympathetic) comment to David Pearce’s Facebook wall:
Of course, none of this was present in my original comment, so although I still believe a charitable reading of it should not have elicited such a hostile reaction, I am aware that I made things easier for those antecedently disinclined to reconsider their attitudes to non-human beings, by giving them an opportunity to dismiss my comments as coming from a self-righteous prig.
Well, unfortunately bad karma can sort of snowball on Less Wrong; when I see a comment in the negative numbers, I instinctively read it (and downthread comments) in a “possibly trolling” light. I’m not sure what might be a good fix for this.
Anyway, I think that people would have given it the benefit of the doubt had it not appeared in a meetup thread. It’s a general rule of etiquette that you don’t start an intellectual argument where people are trying to set up a social gathering- it throws a monkey wrench in the works. Thus, when someone violates the norm, the first assumption is that they’re intending to throw a monkey wrench.
(Yes, the beauty of threaded conversations is that something like this won’t necessarily derail the social gathering. But the norm exists, and while it does it’s smart to be aware of it.)
OK, this is enough meta discussion for me. I hope you make a top-level post so we can actually discuss the issues...