I feel like I recognize this feeling of perceived slipperiness, but the way I experience it does not match all the examples. From the list, the Angry person and both variants of Ontology person feel like bouncing off. This isn’t a case of them sort-of-trying to engage the problem and having a low-effort method of eluding uncomfortable truths; they are putting additional effort into rejecting the idea outright or changing it into something else more agreeable.
Following Eliezer’s example, compare two different reactions to the wrong team winning an election:
Haha, we’re living in a simulation.
They did not win. The election was stolen, and the correct team’s candidate is the true winner. Everything the government does is illegal and I don’t have to listen to it.
The first is slippery; the second is not.
It feels to me like a distinguishing characteristic of the slipperiness is the attempt to grasp the thing-which-slips. This helps to explain the frequency with which the slippery feeling and confusion appear together: confusion is a hagfish.
I feel like I recognize this feeling of perceived slipperiness, but the way I experience it does not match all the examples. From the list, the Angry person and both variants of Ontology person feel like bouncing off. This isn’t a case of them sort-of-trying to engage the problem and having a low-effort method of eluding uncomfortable truths; they are putting additional effort into rejecting the idea outright or changing it into something else more agreeable.
Following Eliezer’s example, compare two different reactions to the wrong team winning an election:
Haha, we’re living in a simulation.
They did not win. The election was stolen, and the correct team’s candidate is the true winner. Everything the government does is illegal and I don’t have to listen to it.
The first is slippery; the second is not.
It feels to me like a distinguishing characteristic of the slipperiness is the attempt to grasp the thing-which-slips. This helps to explain the frequency with which the slippery feeling and confusion appear together: confusion is a hagfish.