I find that Lesswrong yields interesting subjects for study, as well as useful insights pertaining to said subjects, both in the articles themselves and in the attached comments.
However, because of the website format, I have a tendency to succumb to Chronic Internet Distraction Disease while browsing here. To solve this problem, I would like to devise a way to transfer articles and their associated commentary from Lesswrong to my hard drive, where I can read them without the tantalizing proximity of embedded hyperlinks.
The articles themselves can be copy-pasted, but I can think of no good way to handle the issue of translating threaded comments. When I try to copy these directly, my word processor tells me to stick a finger up my nose, because producing smart looks evidently ain't in my nature.
Informed suggestions and clever solutions will be appreciated.
I've had some success reading websites on an Amazon Kindle. It doesn't disable links, but it takes several clicks to select and open one and you can only have one page open a a time. (Reading footnotes is a bit of a pain, though.) There may be other ebook readers or tablets that work similarly or better.
Sun Tzu said, "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." This is also true in rhetoric. The best way to get a belief accepted is to fool people into thinking that they have already accepted it.
(Note, first-year students, that I did not say, "The best way to convince people of a belief". Do not try to convince people! It will not work; and it may start them thinking.)
An excellent way of doing this is to embed your desired conclusion as a presupposition to an enticing argument. If you are debating abortion, and you wish people to believe that human and non-human life are qualitatively different, begin by saying, "We all agree that killing humans is immoral. So when does human life begin?" People will be so eager to jump into the debate about whether a life becomes "human" at conception, the second trimester, or at birth (I myself favor "on moving out of the house"), they won't notice that they agreed to the embedded presupposition that the problem should be phrased as a binary category membership problem, rather than as one of tradeoffs or utility calculations.
Consider the recent furor over whether WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange is a journalist, or can be prosecuted for espionage. I don't know who initially asked this question. The earliest posing of the question that I can find that relates it to the First Amendment is this piece from Fox News on Dec. 8; but Marc Thiessen's column in the Washington Post of Aug. 3 has similar implications. Note that this question presupposes that First Amendment protection applies only to journalists! There is no legal precedent for this that I'm aware of; yet if people spend enough time debating whether Julian Assange is a journalist, they will have unknowingly convinced themselves that ordinary citizens have no First Amendment rights. (We can only hope that this was an artful stroke made from the shadows by some great master of the Dark Arts, and not a mere snowballing of an ignorant question.)