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ata comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Aw, why? Randi looks more wizardly (and must be shipped with Dumbledore at some point, they're perfect for each other, they're both wise accomplished old white-bearded gay wizards...), and I don't see why Shermer requires less suspension of disbelief. (The main thing that made me confused there was figuring that if Randi were really a wizard but still the Randi we know, he'd probably have long ago tried to scientifically investigate magic as Harry intends to, and made some of the same discoveries and many more, and possibly become a supremely powerful and well-known wizard. Am I on the right track or have I overlooked something else implausible that people complained about?)
That was the complaint.
Personally I think a lot of people are confusing expert skepticism with expert science, but if the reader says you're messing with their suspension of disbelief, the reader is always right. Substituting Michael Shermer just makes it a Shout Out instead of an actual conspiracy theory.
Obscure technical tangent but no, they are not. The reader can be confused about the meaning of the phrase, introspectively weak, using the claim purely as a rhetorical soldier or, as is most likely to be the case, some combination thereof.
They're still right. If that's what happened to the reader and broke their suspension of disbelief, that's what happened. It doesn't matter if the reader made a mistake. Your text caused that mistake.
There's this principle, which is good to apply when you can; and then there's the principle of choosing your audience. If you explain a fact in plain language in one sentence, you will miss some percentage of skimmers. If you bring it up four times, you will catch more skimmers and lose anyone who wants a faster pace and less repetition. Similar balances hold for what things do and do not cost suspension of disbelief. If you obey the reader who finds Randi to be a challenge to that suspension, then you weaken your hold on the reader who thought the original version of the tidbit was charming, and has never heard of this replacement fellow. And the reader who disapproves of excessive editing after the fact.
I shouldn't need to explain this to you. You have authored essays on the concept of 'subjectively objective' and my statement was quite clear and even noted that it was purely a technical tangent. In fact, the upvote on its parent was mine.
"What the reader says" is not the same thing as "what happened to the reader". 'What happened to the reader' can be fully determined by the timeless state of reader themselves but is not necessarily the same thing as what the reader says. Just as someone who says "my prior for A is 0.34" when their prior is actually "0.87" is wrong, despite the fact that priors are subjective. Subjective does not mean what people say about themselves must be true.
Still false.
True.
As Eliezer says, a lot of people confuse expert skepticism with expert science...
Randi in real life, as far as I can tell, would not "scientifically investigate magic", but instead, whenever anything happens that looks to some people like magic, he tries to cover it up and pretend it never happened.