a more cryptic and seemingly not-too-clever Robin Hanson post.
Those are wrong more often than they fail to be clever.
The person who misunderstands the point or considers it plain silly implicitly dosen’t belong in the conversation in this style of writing.
I think it is basically storytelling with truth constrained according to rules of Aristotelian inference. Whenever anyone tries to make an implication from that to reality, and actually make predictions, they can be sniped at by the game-players for failing to understand biology. Nothing useful about biology can be learned from this sort of thing.
It is basically inverse Talmudic exegesis.
That piles untrue assumptions atop each other according to elaborate reasoning until fantastical conclusions are reached—conclusions that would be important if true—and protects the merchants of such conclusions from incisive criticism except for by those who invested enough to be able to play the game (and meta-criticism).
This conjoins mundane observations to each other according to an entertaining narrative until a logically true and subjectively interesting influence in biology is discovered—regardless of the fact that the method used to reach the random-vectored conclusion, minus the constraint of having to be entertaining, would endorse countless other truths of similar magnitude and random vector.
Those are wrong more often than they fail to be clever.
I think it is basically storytelling with truth constrained according to rules of Aristotelian inference. Whenever anyone tries to make an implication from that to reality, and actually make predictions, they can be sniped at by the game-players for failing to understand biology. Nothing useful about biology can be learned from this sort of thing.
It is basically inverse Talmudic exegesis.
That piles untrue assumptions atop each other according to elaborate reasoning until fantastical conclusions are reached—conclusions that would be important if true—and protects the merchants of such conclusions from incisive criticism except for by those who invested enough to be able to play the game (and meta-criticism).
This conjoins mundane observations to each other according to an entertaining narrative until a logically true and subjectively interesting influence in biology is discovered—regardless of the fact that the method used to reach the random-vectored conclusion, minus the constraint of having to be entertaining, would endorse countless other truths of similar magnitude and random vector.