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grouchymusicologist comments on "Target audience" size for the Less Wrong sequences - Less Wrong
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Boy, that RationalWiki page is really annoying.
Really? It seems extremely fair-minded to me; then again, I have a thick skin and I agree with most of those criticisms. (Disclaimer: I have never written a single character on RW.)
The Cryonics page, on the other side, makes me raise an eyebrow - there's so much snark mixed with the legitimate criticism that it looks more like a pasted-together forum thread.
Clicking the "Random Page" button several times, that seems to describe pretty much every page there (at least the ones that are about topics that left-leaning traditional rationalists from the English-speaking world don't unanimously agree are good things).
I've got nothing invested in it, but such quotations as
and
don't seem fair-minded to me at all.
(Rather, they both strike me as incorrect and intentionally annoying. Lovingly annoying, says David Gerard, but still.)
Of course David Gerard would say that...
For the first one (the phrasing of which is a quote from a +7 comment) - have you had a chance to read Roko's banned post and subsequent discussion? While grains of salt were employed by the majority, a minority took the concern extremely seriously (including Eliezer, and were his comment to receive widespread attention I think he would soon long for the days when he was simply accused of arrogance).
I agree that the second is too harsh (being in a footnote, I didn't notice it before).
I have read the post-that-shall-not-be-named and studied the discussion somewhat intensively, and I agree with your analysis. However, I believe David was referring to more than just that incident.
As for the second point: while I think it is phrased rather harshly, telling someone to go read the sequences is often a condescending Courtier's reply.
But the Courtier's Reply isn't necessarily a logical fallacy. It is when it serves to mask one's lack of a counterargument; but it isn't usual for the answer to a simple question to be a long, complicated, and easily screwed-up one. I once raised a pretty straightforward question about identity in the LW IRC channel and was directed to one of the Sequences, and in hindsight that proved a lot more useful to me than trying to replicate the whole argument on the spot (though I still wasn't persuaded).
I wouldn't classify the Courtier's Reply as a fallacy in the same sense as the conjunction fallacy or an ad hominem argument, but it is logically rude.
Funny, I didn't even realize that was what "courtier's reply" referred to. The fallacy in the courtier's reply was that the literature referred to could not possibly demonstrate the proposition claimed, because it dealt only with the consequences of said proposition, and hence it can be ignored without actually reading it; so I took that as the defining characteristic, rather than just the referral to a large and intimidating body of literature.
Seems I had it right: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/05/who_says_we_dont_need_bible_sc.php
I stand by my opinion on saying "You should try reading the sequences" - telling someone to read a million words(*) of philosophy before they talk to you is effectively an extremely rude dismissal.
(*) rough estimate. Has anyone counted?
Annoying doesn't necessarily mean incorrect.
As I said when I said hi.