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knb comments on Apology for delay and [link] rationality comic - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
Interesting that this got posted here. This guy seems to think this comic may be an intentional parody of Eliezer Yudkowsky and this community.
That guy went by the handle Caledonian in the days of joint EY/RH blogging at Overcoming Bias and the handle Annoyance after LW was created. He also managed to annoy PZ Myers into banning him from Pharyngula years ago.
Yeah, I knew that blogger was Caledonian. I never understood the cause of the feud between him and Eliezer, though.
Getting banned by Myers isn't exactly difficult, though. The man is extremely prone to righteous anger.
Not as much as one would expect. There's a very long list of people who have been banned but PZ's blog is one of the most popular blogs and covers controversial topics. I haven't seen much evidence that it is easy to get banned by PZ. In the case of Caledonian he got banned from Pharyngula for being generally tone-deaf and engaging in what amounted to trolling but it probably would not have been sufficient to get banned by many bloggers. Note that as Annoyance he never got banned here, and he in fact has positive karma.
Dresden Codak reccomended the Singularity Summit here, saying:
That was in 2009, but if he hasn't changed his position since then he's at least a bit supportive.
Really? Huh, how strange. It sounds to me like a parody of CSICOP or the skeptic movement in general — especially as previously mocked by Robert Anton Wilson in The New Inquisition and the Cosmic Trigger books. "Dresden Codak" has dropped references to Wilson previously, if I recall correctly.
If I had to pick out specific personages being mocked here, I'd pick Martin Gardner or James Randi long before Eliezer. The "weather balloon" reference is specifically to UFO skepticism, which doesn't seem to be a big topic around here, but which was a pretty big deal for the skeptic movement in the '80s.
The scholars in the comic are being "pseudoskeptics", as Marcello Truzzi would say ...
That strikes me as an interpretation which is unlikely to be correct, although note that Greg Egan has explicitly mocked both Eliezer and Robin in one of his recent novels. (I haven't read the story, but the excerpted section struck me as amusing.)
It almost certainly isn't. To the best of my knowledge, the creator of Dresden Codak is a big fan of the singularitarian community, and his complaints are more directed towards mainstream academia.