nyan_sandwich comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (409)
Quit being a martyr. Claiming to be persecuted does not help us understand your ideas, it just adds length to your walls of text.
You claim to want to help us out on some points. If you still think there is something lacking after having read the sequences with actual curiosity (not just following the link and deciding it doesn't fit your worldview), please help. There is a lot lacking, and we need to get new perspectives on things, but you need to understand our deviations before you can criticize them.
If you had read the sequences, specifically the stuff about words, we would be past this terminology discussion crap and into the actual substance.
Do those terms even mean anything? All I hear is you signaling vague academic authority. Clarify your writing and ideas and this will be easier.
EDIT: also, see orwell's "politics and the english language".
No fair! I can legitimately criticize something without total knowledge of it. Here's 1/12,000th of the Talmud, wall of text style for effect, to give a sense of what reading the sequences might feel like for a person who wants to discuss ideas without such homework. Feel free to criticize Rabbinic Judaism without seeing any more Talmud, the "Jewish Sequence," than that below.
It's somewhat relevant to this topic, specifically, the part in bold at the end is where an experiment was conducted to determine religious law.
I agree that if boyi wants to change people's minds, he should understand their opinions and not use words differently than they, and reading the sequences would help with that. But telling someone to just read the sequences is too much, and a way of assigning them an impossible task as a precondition to taking them seriously. That happens somewhat too often here, but you did much better by pointing to one sequence specifically, probably I would have done the exact same thing.
I agree with you that that for effectiveness, boyi should read the words sequence, but reading the sequences aren't a precondition for having better ideas/ideas missed in the sequences, and it was not terribly wrong for boyi to try communicating before having read them, and before getting the feedback in this thread.
You're right; it's a bit unfair. I'll be more specific...
Or give up.