MichaelVassar comments on Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think - Less Wrong

15 Post author: WrongBot 13 July 2010 04:44AM

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Comment author: WrongBot 14 July 2010 07:27:24PM 21 points [-]

My hypothesis is that this is a "realist"/"idealist" divide. Or, to put it another way, one camp is more concerned with being right and the other is more concerned with doing the right thing. ("Right" means two totally different things, here.)

Quality of my post aside (and it really wasn't very good), I think that's where the dividing line has been in the comments.

Similarly, I think most people who value PUA here value it because it works, and most people who oppose it do so on ethical or idealistic grounds. Ditto discussions of status.

The reason the arguments between these camps are so unfruitful, then, is that we're sorting of arguing past each other. We're using different heuristics to evaluate desirability, and then we're surprised when we get different results; I'm as guilty of this as anyone.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 15 July 2010 04:49:18PM 9 points [-]

I strongly agree with this. Count me in the camp of believing true things in literally all situations, as I think that the human brain is too biased for any other approach to result, in expectation, in doing the right thing, but also as in the camp of not necessarily sharing truths that might be expected to be harmful.