lessdazed comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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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.