Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it.
What you did here (from my perspective) was to overtly signal your moral superiority to the rest of us, in a context that wasn't devoted to this discussion.
It was not my intention to signal my moral superiority to members of this community, many of whom I highly respect both morally and intellectually. Instead, I wanted to reflect on the fact that "even a community built around the goal of overcoming bias--and composed of members abnormally smart and truth-oriented--can be quite blatantly biased towards certain classes of beings," as I put it in a rejoinder to the original comment. I fully endorse what Kazuo Thow said in a (sympathetic) comment to David Pearce's Facebook wall:
Rather than taking this as an opportunity to feel like I'm better than much of the LW community, I'll instead reflect on ways that I could be doing that same kind of compartmentalization. Because if a whole community of people dedicated to rationality and self-improvement are suffering a belief-propagation-fail of that magnitude, I'm almost certainly missing something of comparable importance.
Of course, none of this was present in my original comment, so although I still believe a charitable reading of it should not have elicited such a hostile reaction, I am aware that I made things easier for those antecedently disinclined to reconsider their attitudes to non-human beings, by giving them an opportunity to dismiss my comments as coming from a self-righteous prig.
Well, unfortunately bad karma can sort of snowball on Less Wrong; when I see a comment in the negative numbers, I instinctively read it (and downthread comments) in a "possibly trolling" light. I'm not sure what might be a good fix for this.
Anyway, I think that people would have given it the benefit of the doubt had it not appeared in a meetup thread. It's a general rule of etiquette that you don't start an intellectual argument where people are trying to set up a social gathering- it throws a monkey wrench in the works. Thus, when someone violat...
There's a Less Wrong meetup at my house in Berkeley this Saturday, the 25th of December, at 6PM. Celebrate the winter season, the Solstice, and the birth of Sir Isaac Newton among friendly aspiring rationalists, including Eliezer and other SIAI staff and volunteers.
I will cook for everyone in the style I call "paleolithic gourmet" which is cooked meat and raw produce.
I'd like to satisfy everyone's preferences as reasonably as I possibly can without getting vastly more food than will be eaten.
Default menu:
Steak
Lamb Burgers
Bacon
Salad of Berkeley Bowl produce and parmesan
Grilled Portabello and chanterelle mushrooms
Cheese selection
Pita + hummus
Cookies
Feel free to bring a potluck dessert or if you like, an alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage.
The food is free, but if you can afford to, in the spirit of Newtonmas, I suggest a $10 or $15 or $500 donation to SIAI (which will be matched). Please don't not come because you prefer not to pay; no one will be excluded from food or shunned for not paying. I really mean that. Consider the donation not an admission fee and more of a gentle nudge and reminder that optimal philanthropy starts around $10 and that you should positively associate giving money with the fuzzies of eating delicious food.
Please post here if you plan on attending and RSVP on Facebook. You can also post here or PM me with your thoughts on the menu and tell me what you want to eat the most of. I wasn't planning on cooking fish or chicken but can do so if people let me know they want fish or chicken or something else (like a carbohydrate).
My address is 1622 Martin Luther King Jr Way Apt A, Berkeley CA. It's the ground floor apartment around the side, not the upstairs one.