I agree with you. I don't think calling on poets and artists to be poetic and artistic is a problem, I was just interpreting what I thought Eliezer was saying.
Personally, I think Eliezer was actually offended by the idea that non-poets and non-artists cannot be poetic and artistic, i.e. we need poets and artists because these Computer Science/Math people can't express themselves without equations.
But I'm making some big assumptions here, so I could have misread the whole thing.
FWIW, I do believe that non-poets and non-artists can express themselves without equations. That seems kind of like a no-brainer, otherwise we wouldn't be able to communicate at all. Still, artists can probably express themselves better, on the average, than computer scientists and mathematicians. There's nothing wrong with that; we're good at one thing, they're good at another, it'd be a boring old world if everyone was the same.
That's just my personal opinion, though, I'm making no claim regarding whether Eliezer believes this or not.
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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