The linked article is too long and it is not obvious what exactly its point is. I kept repeating to myself be specific, be specific while reading it.
I believe there was most likely one specific thing that offended the author… and rest of the long unspecific article was simply gathering as many soldiers as possible to the battle—and judging by the discussion that started here, successfully.
The summary at the end hints that it was a use of word “eugenics” somewhere on LW, or maybe somewhere on some LW fan’s blog. Unless that was just a metaphor for something. The author is probably disabled and feels personally threatened by any discussion of the topic, so strongly that they will avoid the whole website if they feel that such discussion would not be banned there. Unless that, too, was a metaphor for something.
(The main lesson for me seems to be this: If you want attention, write an article accusing LW of bad things. LW can’t resist this.)
We already practice eugenics, every time we do a genetic test and abort a fetus when it has some horrible transferrable genetic disorder. Frankly, we could do with a bit more of that—there are many, many horrible recessive genetic diseases which people should never have to endure, and which should be eliminated if at all possible. Not doing so strikes me as similar to not trying to cure polio.
Are there people who object to that and approve of abortion in other circumstances? If (mostly) not, then this is (mostly) people whose real objection to abortion is for other reasons, for example religious, and make their objections louder in these cases because the negative associations of eugenics allow them to score rhetorical points.
The people I was thinking of when writing that comment (nearly) always oppose to abortion, but since then someone mentioned something called the Autism Genocide Clock and I decided to google for that.
I ask what do people actually do, and what do people actually protest. Army can at least answer the second question. Non-invasive tests for Down’s weren’t even available before a couple of years ago. Your link appears to be about extensions of that technology, not anywhere near availability. Yes, Tay-Sachs is tested via CVS or amnio, but usually not all Ashkenazim, but only after screening the parents.
That depends on what will insurance pay for and what the parents themselves want. A woman I know who was pregnant about 10 years ago got 5-6 tests as a default (given her insurance, her obstetrician, etc.). Another woman who is still pregnant at the moment got over 10 tests as a default a few months ago.
what do people actually protest
People who protest are typically pro-life people and they protest anything which could possibly lead to a voluntary abortion.
Yes, they need to know our buttons and press them. Such as:
you are an unfriendly place for women;
you say that politics is the mindkiller, but secretly all of you are libertarians (or all of you are conservatives);
you are actually a cult;
...and for the best impact: all of the above, in a long article, with citations out of context from random parts of the website; quoting some offensive and heavily downvoted comments and presenting them as a typical LW content; claiming to be an expert on artificial intelligence or quantum physics and claiming that everything LW says on these topics is a pseudoscience. Did I forget something important? Oh yes, the basilisk! And end with a huge generalization that this all proves that LW is a horrible group of people, and that you will tell everyone you know to avoid LW: both your personal friends, and also any scientist or an organizer of an atheist or skeptic meetup.
(I am not saying this is what the linked article did. Just that this is what I would include into a troll manual, and bet money that LW couldn’t resist discussing such article. But a subset of this is enough to succeed.)
(As it happens, that article’s been linked before in Discussion without triggering a big argument. But the Discussion post was deleted, and the post only mentioned that “Cult of Bayes’ Theorem” article in a parenthetical aside, so it’s not a very good natural experiment.)
It seemed like the whole rationality community was the problem, not just LW. I agree that more specificity would have helped—in particular, the indicators she ignored with other people, and what went wrong in those relationships.
Why wouldn’t the author say what it was, if there was such a thing?
Read the “tl;dr” part at the end of the article. (Someone used the word “eugenics”, and the author was trigegred by this word.)
Why [do you believe there was most likely one specific thing that offended the author]?
The contrast between the widely general text of the article, so that I had problem finding out “what exactly is this person trying to say?”, and the very specific “tl;dr” at the end, which I really would have problem to extract as the main point from the article.
My model of humans (which may be more or less correct, but this is what I use) says that the most likely way to this outcome is the following:
Author reads something and becomes angry. In their mind this connects with dozen other things (which weren’t actually present in the article). Author decides to write a reply in the form of article in their blog. Author writes very generally, because they want to show how things are connected; to emphasise that the thing that triggered them is not just a trivial detail, but a part of an important whole. Overwhelmed by emotions, author writes too general article, and only at the end notices they actually didn’t write the thing that triggered them. But the article is already finished, so they add a “tl;dr” at the end.
A competing hypothesis would have to explain why the “tl;dr” is seemingly unrelated to the rest of the article, when in fact it should be a summary of the article. (My hypothesis is that it is a summary of what author had in mind when deciding to write the article.)
The linked article is too long and it is not obvious what exactly its point is. I kept repeating to myself be specific, be specific while reading it.
I believe there was most likely one specific thing that offended the author… and rest of the long unspecific article was simply gathering as many soldiers as possible to the battle—and judging by the discussion that started here, successfully.
The summary at the end hints that it was a use of word “eugenics” somewhere on LW, or maybe somewhere on some LW fan’s blog. Unless that was just a metaphor for something. The author is probably disabled and feels personally threatened by any discussion of the topic, so strongly that they will avoid the whole website if they feel that such discussion would not be banned there. Unless that, too, was a metaphor for something.
(The main lesson for me seems to be this: If you want attention, write an article accusing LW of bad things. LW can’t resist this.)
Most of the rest of the above comment seems to be insults accusing the author of bad faith, but this bit implied a question of fact:
Probably here.
We already practice eugenics, every time we do a genetic test and abort a fetus when it has some horrible transferrable genetic disorder. Frankly, we could do with a bit more of that—there are many, many horrible recessive genetic diseases which people should never have to endure, and which should be eliminated if at all possible. Not doing so strikes me as similar to not trying to cure polio.
And indeed there are plenty of people who object to that (at least where I am—it may be different in places further away from the Pope).
Could you be more specific? What genetic tests do people do; and which receive objections? Just Down’s?
The objection is not to the tests, it’s to aborting when you don’t like their results.
Are there people who object to that and approve of abortion in other circumstances? If (mostly) not, then this is (mostly) people whose real objection to abortion is for other reasons, for example religious, and make their objections louder in these cases because the negative associations of eugenics allow them to score rhetorical points.
The people I was thinking of when writing that comment (nearly) always oppose to abortion, but since then someone mentioned something called the Autism Genocide Clock and I decided to google for that.
There is a variety of tests, their number grows all the time and some of them are specific to particular gene pools. Prenatal tests for more than 800 genetic disorders have been developed.
For a common example, people with Jewish Ashkenazi ancestry are tested for Tay-Sachs, others are not.
I ask what do people actually do, and what do people actually protest. Army can at least answer the second question. Non-invasive tests for Down’s weren’t even available before a couple of years ago. Your link appears to be about extensions of that technology, not anywhere near availability. Yes, Tay-Sachs is tested via CVS or amnio, but usually not all Ashkenazim, but only after screening the parents.
That depends on what will insurance pay for and what the parents themselves want. A woman I know who was pregnant about 10 years ago got 5-6 tests as a default (given her insurance, her obstetrician, etc.). Another woman who is still pregnant at the moment got over 10 tests as a default a few months ago.
People who protest are typically pro-life people and they protest anything which could possibly lead to a voluntary abortion.
I don’t think a random person critiquing LW would have the same impact. They also have to be “oppressed” or something.
Yes, they need to know our buttons and press them. Such as:
you are an unfriendly place for women;
you say that politics is the mindkiller, but secretly all of you are libertarians (or all of you are conservatives);
you are actually a cult;
...and for the best impact: all of the above, in a long article, with citations out of context from random parts of the website; quoting some offensive and heavily downvoted comments and presenting them as a typical LW content; claiming to be an expert on artificial intelligence or quantum physics and claiming that everything LW says on these topics is a pseudoscience. Did I forget something important? Oh yes, the basilisk! And end with a huge generalization that this all proves that LW is a horrible group of people, and that you will tell everyone you know to avoid LW: both your personal friends, and also any scientist or an organizer of an atheist or skeptic meetup.
(I am not saying this is what the linked article did. Just that this is what I would include into a troll manual, and bet money that LW couldn’t resist discussing such article. But a subset of this is enough to succeed.)
You forgot torture vs dust specks, nerd rapture, building a benevolent God, and many-worlds.
...and cryonics.
Eh, it’s been done.
(As it happens, that article’s been linked before in Discussion without triggering a big argument. But the Discussion post was deleted, and the post only mentioned that “Cult of Bayes’ Theorem” article in a parenthetical aside, so it’s not a very good natural experiment.)
It seemed like the whole rationality community was the problem, not just LW. I agree that more specificity would have helped—in particular, the indicators she ignored with other people, and what went wrong in those relationships.
Why?
What might it have been?
Why wouldn’t the author say what it was, if there was such a thing?
Read the “tl;dr” part at the end of the article. (Someone used the word “eugenics”, and the author was trigegred by this word.)
The contrast between the widely general text of the article, so that I had problem finding out “what exactly is this person trying to say?”, and the very specific “tl;dr” at the end, which I really would have problem to extract as the main point from the article.
My model of humans (which may be more or less correct, but this is what I use) says that the most likely way to this outcome is the following:
Author reads something and becomes angry. In their mind this connects with dozen other things (which weren’t actually present in the article). Author decides to write a reply in the form of article in their blog. Author writes very generally, because they want to show how things are connected; to emphasise that the thing that triggered them is not just a trivial detail, but a part of an important whole. Overwhelmed by emotions, author writes too general article, and only at the end notices they actually didn’t write the thing that triggered them. But the article is already finished, so they add a “tl;dr” at the end.
A competing hypothesis would have to explain why the “tl;dr” is seemingly unrelated to the rest of the article, when in fact it should be a summary of the article. (My hypothesis is that it is a summary of what author had in mind when deciding to write the article.)