My “ick” sense is being set off pretty heavily by the idea of people publicly professing their faith in a shared set of beliefs, so this post makes me deeply uncomfortable. At best something like this is a self congratulatory applause light which doesn’t add anything, at worst it makes us less critical and leads us further towards the dreaded c word.
I disagree. From checking “recent comments” a couple times a day as is my habit, I feel like the past few days have seen an outpouring of criticism of Eliezer and the sequences by a small handful of people who don’t appear to have put in the effort to actually read and understand them, and I am thankful to the OP for providing a counterbalance to that.
It degrades the quality of discussion to profess agreement or disagreement with such a large cluster of ideas simultaneously. Kind of like saying “I’m Republican and the Republican platform is what our country needs”, without going into specifics on why the Republican platform is so cool.
I think it would have been fine for Grognor to summarize arguments that have been made in the past for more controversial points in the Sequences. But as it stands, this post looks like pure politics to me.
My “ick” sense is being set off pretty heavily by the idea of people publicly professing their faith in a shared set of beliefs, so this post makes me deeply uncomfortable. At best something like this is a self congratulatory applause light which doesn’t add anything, at worst it makes us less critical and leads us further towards the dreaded c word.
I disagree. From checking “recent comments” a couple times a day as is my habit, I feel like the past few days have seen an outpouring of criticism of Eliezer and the sequences by a small handful of people who don’t appear to have put in the effort to actually read and understand them, and I am thankful to the OP for providing a counterbalance to that.
If we can only tolerate people criticising the sequences, and no one saying they agree with them, then we have a serious problem.
It degrades the quality of discussion to profess agreement or disagreement with such a large cluster of ideas simultaneously. Kind of like saying “I’m Republican and the Republican platform is what our country needs”, without going into specifics on why the Republican platform is so cool.
I think it would have been fine for Grognor to summarize arguments that have been made in the past for more controversial points in the Sequences. But as it stands, this post looks like pure politics to me.
This is a good feeling. It means we are doing something right.
If we are well-calibrated wrt to phyg-risk, you should see large proclamations of agreement about as often as criticisms.
Rationalists should study marching in lockstep and agreeing with the group as much as they should practice lonely dissent.