Zack_M_Davis comments on Open Thread: February 2010 - Less Wrong

1 Post author: wedrifid 01 February 2010 06:09AM

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Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 05 February 2010 05:48:58PM *  3 points [-]

I'm sorry; I was being unfair. Downvote my first comment in this thread, please.

I also had a moment of self-awareness this morning---I just criticized you for voting for social-strategic reasons rather than solely the merit of the comment, but surely I was doing the same sort of thing that time when I upvoted Toby Ord even though I thought his comment was terrible because Toby Ord is a hotshot academic and I don't want him to think poorly of this community! Although speaking of self-awareness, maybe I should also mention that from introspection I can't tell if I would be having this same response if you weren't the eminent Wei Dai ...

Augh! Could it be that we at Less Wrong are smart enough to avoid all the ordinary status games, but not smart enough to avoid the meta recursive anti-status status games? O horror; O terrible humanity!

Comment author: wedrifid 05 February 2010 06:04:06PM 0 points [-]

Augh! Could it be that we at Less Wrong are smart enough to avoid all the ordinary status games

Not even close. It takes a lot of intellectual effort to keep track of what is actually going on in the conversations, even if they are slightly less 'Wrong' here.

I upvoted Toby Ord even though I thought his comment was terrible because Toby Ord is a hotshot academic

Toby is a hot shot academic? Now that fits things together somewhat better.

Comment author: thomblake 05 February 2010 06:32:08PM 1 point [-]

Toby is a hot shot academic?

Sometimes these labels don't make a lot of sense to the people they're applied to. I've in the past been called a "serious academic", amongst other dubious things.