But on second thought my previous comment isn’t the reason why this otherwise neat example of a “click moment” hasn’t received more attention for its content. Considering that CharlieSheen’s (!) comment has been up voted to ~20, I think what’s produced a collective twitch of the LW community is that Angel Harris is just so far away from the quiet consensus that seems to have emerged on some educational matters and the near consensus on the intellectual validity of scepticism towards given explanations for the gap (a large minority basically endorses a hereditarian explanation, while (I speculate since there haven’t been polls on the matter due to signalling concerns) a major espouse agnosticism regarding what the given explanations being wrong entails).
He thus comes of as conspicuously wrong on some of the stuff written in his book and on the page you linked to. He’s not even wrong in a unpopular brave thinker kind of way, he’s just wrong in the standard way we keep running into and that probably bothers rationalists like a bad itch they can’t quite reach. I suspect someone bringing up a particularly lucid moment of instrumental rationality in one of Ratzinger’s theological writings that was followed by its application to immaculate conception would have received a similar response. Perhaps even slightly better, because we seem to now view religion as obviously silly and relatively cheap to reject for most fresh new rationalists on the site.
Perhaps we can together digg for more examples of this, to try and illustrate this point further and perhaps spark a productive debate (that I think the “click” moment deserves)? At the very least the high up vote (and probably a few downvotes) of the comment of the thread indicates lots of people have read this thread.
But on second thought my previous comment isn’t the reason why this otherwise neat example of a “click moment” hasn’t received more attention for its content. Considering that CharlieSheen’s (!) comment has been up voted to ~20, I think what’s produced a collective twitch of the LW community is that Angel Harris is just so far away from the quiet consensus that seems to have emerged on some educational matters and the near consensus on the intellectual validity of scepticism towards given explanations for the gap (a large minority basically endorses a hereditarian explanation, while (I speculate since there haven’t been polls on the matter due to signalling concerns) a major espouse agnosticism regarding what the given explanations being wrong entails).
He thus comes of as conspicuously wrong on some of the stuff written in his book and on the page you linked to. He’s not even wrong in a unpopular brave thinker kind of way, he’s just wrong in the standard way we keep running into and that probably bothers rationalists like a bad itch they can’t quite reach. I suspect someone bringing up a particularly lucid moment of instrumental rationality in one of Ratzinger’s theological writings that was followed by its application to immaculate conception would have received a similar response. Perhaps even slightly better, because we seem to now view religion as obviously silly and relatively cheap to reject for most fresh new rationalists on the site.
Perhaps we can together digg for more examples of this, to try and illustrate this point further and perhaps spark a productive debate (that I think the “click” moment deserves)? At the very least the high up vote (and probably a few downvotes) of the comment of the thread indicates lots of people have read this thread.