wedrifid comments on Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn't) help - Less Wrong

57 Post author: AnnaSalamon 18 November 2010 10:37PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 26 November 2010 12:34:26PM 0 points [-]

What do you mean? Are you saying that everyone with an average IQ is supposed to be able to understand what it means to minimize the within-cluster sum of squared differences, regardless of education?

No, approximately the opposite of that. Are you sure you didn't intend this to be a reply to Peter? It seems to be quite an odd reply to me in the context.

Comment author: XiXiDu 26 November 2010 01:37:40PM *  0 points [-]

You said that you have been polite in what you previously wrote. I parsed that the way that you agree with Peter de Blanc but that you have chosen to communicate this fact in a way that makes it possible to arrive at the conclusion without stating it. In other words, I should have been able to understand the sentence.

I didn't reply to Peter de Blanc because I don't know him and he doesn't know me and so his statement that he would have understood Y without X doesn't give me much information regarding my own intelligence. But you have actually read a lot of my comments and addressed me directly in the discussion above.

Interestingly I'm having a discussion (see my previous comments) with Roko if one should tell people directly if they are dumb or try to communicate such a truth differently.

Comment author: wedrifid 26 November 2010 02:02:22PM 0 points [-]

Note polite enough to lie but polite enough to leave off all the caveats and exceptions. Some here could, understand the sentence even with no education in mathematics. Even so, the essentials of what I said was sincere. Piecing together that kind of jargon from the scraps of information available in the context is a far harder task than just understanding the article itself.