Ok, I think I see how I misinterpreted the original article. Eliezer (and you as well, I think) is not downgrading the contribution of artists; he's just pointing out the original speakers' hypocrisy. He claims that in reality, the speakers don't feel that the artists have anything to contribute; but they publicly claim otherwise in order to appear more sophisticated (or something).
This statement I can agree with. Hypocrisy is destructive and wrong.
Today's post, We Don't Really Want Your Participation was originally published on 10 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Radical Honesty, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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