nhamann comments on What is the Archimedean point of morality? - Less Wrong

-3 Post author: draq 29 October 2010 09:56PM

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Comment author: nhamann 29 October 2010 11:58:08PM *  4 points [-]

I have a hard time understanding what you're saying in this and the last post. You need to play more rationalist taboo.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 October 2010 12:22:00AM 6 points [-]

You need to play more rationalist taboo.

It would be nice to follow the same advice ourselves and not bombard newbies with lesswrong-specific jargon they probably don't understand. At the very least, we should provide links to a description. Such as Rationalist Taboo.

Comment author: nhamann 30 October 2010 01:10:39AM *  0 points [-]

I was just going to say that I had already linked him to that page in a previous reply to him, but it turns out I linked a different page. Oops. :[ Good call.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 October 2010 01:18:27AM 1 point [-]

Isn't that what the wiki is supposed to be?

Comment author: nhamann 30 October 2010 01:32:10AM *  0 points [-]

Sorry I edited the above post and was working on it when you must've replied to the unedited post. The wiki (and even the FAQ) basically just says "and here's all the sequences that you can read." Yeah, I get that there's inferential distance between a completely new participant (such as draq) and the rest of the LW community, but I think it would be useful to have a short guide that serves as a brief introduction to LW.

This guide could also serve as a solid primer on LW core tenets and community norms for participants who really don't need to trudge through all of the sequences, but might be able to pick up the ideas much more quickly: something like the mind projection fallacy, which was particularly easy to understand, and could've really been explained in a paragraph or two.

Comment author: Relsqui 30 October 2010 03:41:24AM 0 points [-]
Comment author: draq 30 October 2010 08:45:41PM 0 points [-]

Are you asking me to use a certain LW-inside vocabulary? In that case, a dictionary would be helpful. Which specific word or phrase is not clear to you?

Or are you holding a logical positivist position that some words or context does not have any meaning at all?

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 01 November 2010 11:58:15PM 0 points [-]

Are you asking me to use a certain LW-inside vocabulary? In that case, a dictionary would be helpful.

The idea of rationalist taboo is not to use LW-inside vocabulary. On the contrary, one lesson of rationalist taboo is that we should be able to reduce LW-inside vocabulary to non-LW-inside vocabulary. If we can't do that, we're doing rationalism wrong.