Yeah, it does tend to lend sort of a cultish feel to the whole thing...I think Eliezer knows this, but underestimates how strongly people react to it. Remember, the general population is composed of the kind of people who think that dinosaurs and humans coexisted and don’t know what a year is (or at least the general population in the US, I haven’t seen similar studies from other areas). Don’t expect them to be able to detect irony (if they even know that irony isn’t an adjective relating to iron).
Yeah, it does tend to lend sort of a cultish feel to the whole thing...I think Eliezer knows this, but underestimates how strongly people react to it. Remember, the general population is composed of the kind of people who think that dinosaurs and humans coexisted and don’t know what a year is (or at least the general population in the US, I haven’t seen similar studies from other areas). Don’t expect them to be able to detect irony (if they even know that irony isn’t an adjective relating to iron).