SoullessAutomaton comments on Akrasia and Shangri-La - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2009 08:53PM

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Comment author: AlanCrowe 10 April 2009 11:12:08PM 10 points [-]

The message that I'm taking home from your post is that if we wish to be "less wrong" we should avoid sarcasm. Here is my analysis.

The first paragraph alludes to the fattening of America in the recent past. Something has changed. The article about exercise talks about different genotypes responding differently to exercise, but it is not offering a diachronic account of the recent fattening. It seems unlikely that gene frequencies in the population have changed, leaving more people immune to exercise today than in the recent past, and the article does not propose this.

So hidden beneath the sarcasm is a relevant point, that immunity to exercise hasn't undergone a recent big change. How much damage has this done to the logical coherence of the post?

Paragraph 2 talks of self-handicapping and making excuses. That sounds like human nature to me, and human nature hasn't changed in forty years. So the same knock-down applies to both immunity to exercise and to self-handicapping.

Now AlexU may wish to come back and say: the rise of therapy culture and psycho-babble are big, recent changes. I'll leaving those who favour this view to argue for it.

What I'm noticing is that the implicit negation in sarcasm makes it harder to follow the internal logic of a post. Using sarcasm makes it harder to write a clever and internally consistent post.

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 11 April 2009 12:28:16AM 5 points [-]

The first paragraph alludes to the fattening of America in the recent past. Something has changed.

It's worth noting, in the context of this whole discussion, that the increasing homogenization of Americans' eating habits because of franchise restaurants and mass-produced supermarket food is a possible change that is consistent with the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet.