Douglas_Knight comments on The Twin Webs of Knowledge - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 28 August 2009 09:45AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 August 2009 07:31:43PM *  11 points [-]

Finding out about human nature, and particularly your own nature is typically a soul-destroying experience,

Either we have very different natures or you're doing it wrong. Are you sure you're really understanding your own nature, or are you just being told in a flat voice that it's non-mysterious but without actually having the sort of knowledge you'd need to e.g. build a copy of yourself?

I've been pleasantly surprised by the fact that every piece of knowledge I feared has turned out not to cause an internal catastrophe once I obtained it.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 30 August 2009 03:06:19AM 0 points [-]

I've been pleasantly surprised by the fact that every piece of knowledge I feared has turned out not to cause an internal catastrophe once I obtained it.

What did you fear?

Maybe I'm reading too much into this phrasing, but I really don't like that "once I obtained it." It would be plausible if you were saying that you feared things from afar, but once you were forced to deal with them, it turned out that you could live with them, and you could have figured that out if you'd confronted them ahead of time. But it sounds like you're saying that they only turned out to be unproblematic when you got close to them, which sounds suspicious to me.