Not every post needs to prove the validity of each concept it connects with.
Nobody ever said that it does. It’s ok not to give any arguments. It’s bad when you do give arguments and those arguments are bad. Can you confirm whether you see any arguments in the OP and whether you find them logically sound? Maybe I am hallucinating.
Yudkowsky simply wasn’t trying to convince a skeptic of memetic collapse in this post
That would be fine, I could almost believe that it’s ok to give bad arguments when the purpose of the post is different. But then, he also linked to another facebook post which is explicitly about explaining memetic collapse, and the arguments there are no better.
Rob is defending the use of [(possibly shared) intuition?]
What is that intuition exactly? And is it really shared?
I’m a bit late to this but I’m glad to see that you were pointing this stuff out in thread. I see this post as basically containing 2 things:
some useful observations about how the law (and The Law) requires even-handed application to serve its purpose, and how thinking about the law at this abstract level has parallels in other sorts of logical thinking such as the sort mathematicians do a lot of. this stuff feels like the heart of the post and i think it’s mostly correct. i’m unsure how convinced i would be if i didn’t already mostly agree with it, though.
some stuff about how people used to be better in the past, which strikes me as basically the “le wrong generation” meme applied to Being Smart rather than Having Taste. this stuff i think is all basically false and is certainly unsupported in the text.
i think you’re seeing (2) as more central to the post than I am, so I’m less bothered by its inclusion.
But I think you’re correct to point out that it’s unsupported, and i’m in agreement that it’s probably false, and I’m glad you pointed out the irony of giving locally-invalid evidence in a post about how doing that is bad, and it seems to me that Rob spent quite a lot of words totally failing to engage with your actual criticism.
Nobody ever said that it does. It’s ok not to give any arguments. It’s bad when you do give arguments and those arguments are bad. Can you confirm whether you see any arguments in the OP and whether you find them logically sound? Maybe I am hallucinating.
That would be fine, I could almost believe that it’s ok to give bad arguments when the purpose of the post is different. But then, he also linked to another facebook post which is explicitly about explaining memetic collapse, and the arguments there are no better.
What is that intuition exactly? And is it really shared?
I’m a bit late to this but I’m glad to see that you were pointing this stuff out in thread. I see this post as basically containing 2 things:
some useful observations about how the law (and The Law) requires even-handed application to serve its purpose, and how thinking about the law at this abstract level has parallels in other sorts of logical thinking such as the sort mathematicians do a lot of. this stuff feels like the heart of the post and i think it’s mostly correct. i’m unsure how convinced i would be if i didn’t already mostly agree with it, though.
some stuff about how people used to be better in the past, which strikes me as basically the “le wrong generation” meme applied to Being Smart rather than Having Taste. this stuff i think is all basically false and is certainly unsupported in the text.
i think you’re seeing (2) as more central to the post than I am, so I’m less bothered by its inclusion.
But I think you’re correct to point out that it’s unsupported, and i’m in agreement that it’s probably false, and I’m glad you pointed out the irony of giving locally-invalid evidence in a post about how doing that is bad, and it seems to me that Rob spent quite a lot of words totally failing to engage with your actual criticism.