In this case, though, the “What? Why?” actually was rhetorical on my part. (Note the link to “Fake Optimization Criteria”, which was intended to suggest that I don’t think the optimization criterion of defeating death recommends the policy of clamoring in the streets.) It’s not that I didn’t understand the “cishumanists accept Death because they believe that the customs of their tribe are the laws of nature” point, it was that I disagreed with its attempted use as an illustration of the concept of social reality (because I think transhumanists similarly fail to understand that the customary optimism of their tribe is no substitute for engineering know-how), and was trying to use “naïve” Socratic questioning/inquiry to illustrate what I thought means-end reasoning about causal reality actually looks like. I can see how the this could be construed as a violation of some possible discourse norms (like the Recurse Center’s “No feigned surprise” rule), but sometimes I find some such norms unduly constraining on the way I naturally talk and express ideas!
In this case, though, the “What? Why?” actually was rhetorical on my part. (Note the link to “Fake Optimization Criteria”, which was intended to suggest that I don’t think the optimization criterion of defeating death recommends the policy of clamoring in the streets.) It’s not that I didn’t understand the “cishumanists accept Death because they believe that the customs of their tribe are the laws of nature” point, it was that I disagreed with its attempted use as an illustration of the concept of social reality (because I think transhumanists similarly fail to understand that the customary optimism of their tribe is no substitute for engineering know-how), and was trying to use “naïve” Socratic questioning/inquiry to illustrate what I thought means-end reasoning about causal reality actually looks like. I can see how the this could be construed as a violation of some possible discourse norms (like the Recurse Center’s “No feigned surprise” rule), but sometimes I find some such norms unduly constraining on the way I naturally talk and express ideas!