That seems like a failure of noticing confusion; some clear things are actually false.
Nominull
Karma: 2,932
This post is a good example of why LW is dying. Specifically, that it was posted as a comment to a garbage-collector thread in the second-class area. Something is horribly wrong with the selection mechanism for what gets on the front page.
[citation needed]
You favor lying to people to scam money out of them because it would be inconvenient for your education plans to not be able to scam money out of them? That seems unethical.
Does that actually work better than just setting a higher bar for significance? My gut says that data is data and chopping it up cleverly can’t work magic.
If I have no value as a human, I desire to believe I have no value as a human.
Are you planning to do any analysis on what traits are associated with defection? That could get ugly fast.
(I took the survey)
Probably the only two things the True Patronus can look like are humans and snakes. Possibly flying squirrels?
There’s room for improvement, but this is just a rant. It’s useless for the project of improvement, because he’s attacking anything he can find a clever turn of phrase for, rather than the things that especially deserve attack.
It’s not even useful to see where the PR failure is, because once something set him off, everything suddenly became a PR failure. Look for insight in saner places than this, please.
It looks like he’s turned the flawed methodology of the skeptic community (things like pattern-matching against surface features of known bullshit and mockery as an argument) on the skeptic community itself. I’d say “serves them right” except we’re supposed to be virtuous identity-free robots who take no pleasure in or offense from anything.
It strikes me as a little awful to only care about bad people inasmuch as they’re likely to become good people. Maybe I’ve been perverted by my Catholic upbringing, but I was taught to love everyone, including the sinners, including the people you’d never want to hang out with. This appeals to me in part because I sin and people don’t want to hang out with me, and yet I want to be loved regardless.
It’s possible that I am the weird one here, but shows with complex but evil characters such as Breaking Bad do seem largely popular. There is a large current in modern adult TV of these sorts of villainous antagonists, and I think it’s more than just false sophistication. I think it’s people with the courage to see the dark parts of themselves reflected in fictional characters.
I think this is probably being too kind to my unhandicapped abilities. Rather than handicapping myself because I’m too powerful, I think the key issue is that I see things on a metalevel and analytically, such that I can notice that there is little difference between “social adeptitude” and “manipulation”. And so, in order to avoid being manipulative, I consciously avoid developing social skills. I think reflectivity and pathological non-hypocrisy are the key dynamics, not inherent manipulative ability.
Right, but he seems to implicitly claim that characters who follow those disvirtues are necessarily unsympathetic. Some of us are sometimes disvirtuous.
I suspect the thermostat is closer to the human mind than his conception of the human mind is.
Today we kneel only to hypocrisy.
You’re confusing “evil” with “unsympathetic”. Maybe those mean the same thing to you, but we don’t all have your unimpeachable moral character.
Peace if possible, truth at all costs. -- Martin Luther
The fact that he started some really bloody wars over something that didn’t even turn out to be true should maybe give us some pause before we endorse virtues like this.
That’s harder to distinguish from the outside.
If you run in social circles where having well-calibrated beliefs is high-status, not gonna name any names.
Yeah, I feel like in real world situations, hypothesizing time travel when things don’t make sense is not likely to be epistemically successful.
Wasn’t there a proverb about generalizing from fictional evidence? Especially from fiction that intentionally doesn’t make sense?