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CG_Morton comments on On the Openness personality trait & 'rationality' - Less Wrong
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The title had me captivated. However:
This post could use some more exposition in between the quotes. When "parasite load" was mentioned, my immediate assumption was that this was a metaphorical usage referring to "parasitic" ideas or memes, and was quite confused when I encountered a discussion of skin infections and whatnot, suggesting that somehow the literal sense of biological parasites was intended. This was confusing because I wasn't expecting any connection between psychological personality traits such as openness on the one hand and susceptibility to infectious disease on the other. Maybe such a connection is well-known in some circles, but I was totally unprepared for it and it came across to me as a bizarrely privileged hypothesis. Some more emphatic exposition, saying in effect "yes reader, I really do intend to relate the personality trait of openness to the medical phenomenon of infectious diseases" would have been helpful.
The article spends two paragraphs explaining the link between openness and disease, and then even links to the wikipedia page for parasite load. You link to 'Inferential Distance', but this seems more like a case of 'didn't really read the article' or perhaps 'came into it with really strong pre-conceptions of what it would be about, and didn't bother to update them based on what was actually there'.
...which is no more than a stub, and suffers from the same problem. In fact, I was probably even more irritated by the Wikipedia article than the post. It abruptly mentions "openness to experience" as if the reader were perfectly well expecting a discussion of human personality in an entry on biological parasites.
I was able to comprehend the article, but it didn't feel satisfactory. The problem was that I was "offended" by the unprepared juxtaposition of concepts that I wasn't expecting to be juxtaposed. You could call this a "really strong pre-conception of what it would be about", in a negative sense: I didn't think it would be about that.
This is exactly what inferential distance is: when the writer is "on a different planet" from the reader.
Your irritations should be correlated, since gwern is the author of that abrupt addition to the WP article as well as of the above post.