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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Comments (857)
Please edit both of the above to avoid having your comments deleted. It's great that you have that opinion, but some people may not share it, and also there's this incredible amazing technology called rot13 which is really useful for having your cake and eating it too in the case of this conflict. And we can all consider that official LW policy from this point forward.
I know a couple people that claim to have unintentionally learned to read rot13 to the point where it is no longer a spoiler protection. (I can read it, but it's not automatic.)
It's all well and good to have some character of the founder rub off on the site, but not every fetish.
I don't think you understand the degree to which people who don't want spoilers, don't want to hear them.
Spoilers for a classic movie here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1s4/open_thread_february_2010_part_2/1ndd
Since the actual intent of the comment was to spoiler it can probably be deleted without further discussion.
EDIT: the edit is a big improvement. It used to be an actual spoiler.
The actual intent was to point out that embargoing references past a certain point truly is ridiculous. Referencing a 69 year old movie (EDIT: several hundred year old play) is an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum, made more visceral by technically violating the norm Eliezer is imposing.
Certainly there's no real need to discuss specific plot points of recent manga or anime on this site. This, in fact, holds for any specific example one cares to name. On the other hand, the cumulative cutting off all our cultural references to fiction does impose a real harm to the discourse.
References to fiction let us compress our communications more effectively by pointing at examples of what we mean. My words alone can't have nearly the effect a full color motion picture with surround sound can -- but I can borrow it, if I'm allowed to reference works that most people are broadly familiar with.
I don't think that most recent works count -- they reach too small a segment of LW, and so are the least useful to reference, and the ones most likely to upset those who are spoiler averse. The question is where the line should be set, and that requires context and judgment, not universal bans.
I think there's a cost/benefit tradeoff, and that comment is all cost, no benefit.
While I admit that the benefit was not in the same class as the ones discussed in my point above, clearly I thought it had some benefit in making my point.
And yes, it had costs -- it needed to, in order to make the point. Of course, ceteris paribus, the better the job at illustrating the reductio-ad-absurdum, the smaller the cost. I tried to choose an example with the smallest cost I reasonably could.
If you have a popular and well-known, older work that has what is truly a spoiler, but that (a) most people already know, and (b) the work is short enough that a huge time-investment isn't likely to be ruined (why I chose a movie, rather than a book), I'd be willing to change the example to that.
I refer you in that case to the canonical example...
Roger Ebert responding to a reader about [edit: the "spoiler" in the title of] The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (Warning: contains a Sixth Sense spoiler.)
Upvoted for pun.
If there's a pun I'm afraid it's unintentional - are you referring to the literal meaning of "canon" in this context?
Did you pick that movie for that reason, or because that's what TV Tropes used? Because I've never seen it, but I do know that Macduff was not of woman born - and Macbeth is rather better known.
Edit: Better still is "Romeo and Juliet die at the end".
I did not know that TV Tropes used it, but I have seen other people use it for the same sort of point.
I'll change it.
In that case can we have a little rot-13 widget built into LW? Or is there a Firefox plugin I should be using?
(Personally I think the whole "spoilers" thing is ridiculous, but I'm fine with this as site policy if it's easy to do.)
I use this “bookmarklet”:
javascript:inText=window.getSelection()+'';if(inText=='')%7Bvoid(inText=prompt('Phrase...',''))%7D;if(!inText)%7BoutText='No%20text%20selected'%7Delse%7BoutText='';for(i=0;i%3CinText.length;i++)%7Bt=inText.charCodeAt(i);if((t%3E64&&t%3C78)%7C%7C(t%3E96&&t%3C110))%7Bt+=13%7Delse%7Bif((t%3E77&&t%3C91)%7C%7C(t%3E109&&t%3C123))%7Bt-=13%7D%7DoutText+=String.fromCharCode(t)%7D%7Dalert(outText)
[Not written by me; I have no record of where I obtained it.]
Put it in your bookmarks bar in most web browsers, and when you click it it will display the rot13 of the selected text, or prompt you for text if there isn't any selection. In Safari the first entries in the bookmarks bar get shortcuts ⌘1, ⌘2, ..., so it ends up that to rot13 something on a web page I just need to select it and press ⌘3.
Excellent, thank you.
www.rot13.com ?
Good, although having to open a new tab still seems less than maximally convenient.
(Actually, doing a hidden-text thing like TVTropes does would be pretty good, come to think of it.)