Demosthenes comments on Defense Against The Dark Arts: Case Study #1 - Less Wrong

100 Post author: Yvain 28 March 2009 02:31AM

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Comment author: Demosthenes 29 March 2009 03:35:12AM 4 points [-]

In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.

....or maybe the quotation and by extension the entire comment were meant to suggest that traditionally materialist concerns like sanitation, wealth and longevity are more deserving of the title enlightenment and than our categorizing of enlightenment to only mean the spirit is not entirely accurate. Expressing wonder at reductionist, material understanding of the universe shouldn't be new to this crowd. Expressing value judgements do not a dark art make.

...or maybe it meant to ignore all Indian claims to enlightenment....

There is a lot of nonsense on OB and LW about separating content from style; the occasional attempts to translate into positivist verifiable claims or examples of Dark Arts often say more about the person doing the translating than illuminating the text for the reader.

Yvain obviously interpreted this in a very specific way. Yvain has a good basis for asking Phil to clarify the issues. These sorts of things are more valuable as discussions and instead it was turned into a broadcast.

This is not a criticism, but just a suggestion that the world of give-and-take, persuasion and rebuttal can be a lot more valuable than posting an instantiation of meaning for the comment that is highly suspect at best.

Comment author: William 29 March 2009 04:51:17AM 4 points [-]

As a sidenote, it's a very good sign that this discussion has followed the path of

Case studies in medicine are most interesting when all the student doctors disagree with each other.