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Konkvistador comments on [LINK] Loss of local knowledge affecting intellectual trends - Less Wrong
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Try reading and approaching this as you would a more cryptic and seemingly not-too-clever Robin Hanson post. Skimming through some of the posts, they seem to be employing signalling by not using big words even if it increases ambiguity. The person who misunderstands the point or considers it plain silly implicitly dosen't belong in the conversation in this style of writing. At the same time it gives some insight even to complete outsiders, basically it is a way to write to other metacontrarians to signal you are one of them and exclude the pesky dull contrarians while tolerating some of the better behaved "uneducated". It is, I suspect, also just plain fun to write that way, since it lends itself easily to mocking regular contrarian opinions.
Those are wrong more often than they fail to be clever.
I think it is basically storytelling with truth constrained according to rules of Aristotelian inference. Whenever anyone tries to make an implication from that to reality, and actually make predictions, they can be sniped at by the game-players for failing to understand biology. Nothing useful about biology can be learned from this sort of thing.
It is basically inverse Talmudic exegesis.
That piles untrue assumptions atop each other according to elaborate reasoning until fantastical conclusions are reached - conclusions that would be important if true - and protects the merchants of such conclusions from incisive criticism except for by those who invested enough to be able to play the game (and meta-criticism).
This conjoins mundane observations to each other according to an entertaining narrative until a logically true and subjectively interesting influence in biology is discovered - regardless of the fact that the method used to reach the random-vectored conclusion, minus the constraint of having to be entertaining, would endorse countless other truths of similar magnitude and random vector.