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I'm genuinely confused at this point and just trying to figure out how this happened. From my point of view, the fact that this got posted without him realizing that it was going to be mistaken as a pro-terrorism piece is, by itself, surprising. That it was beta tested by other LW'ers first and STILL made it out like this is even more surprising.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything, paper-machine. This isn't a debate. I am just going WTF.
There's a strong feeling in the culture here that it's virtuous to be able to discuss weird and scary ideas without feeling weirded out or scared. See: torture and dust specks, AI risk, uploading, and so on.
Personally, I agree with you now about this article, because I can see that you and the fellow above and probably others feel strongly about it. But when I read it originally, it never occurred to me to feel creeped out, because I've made myself to just think calmly about ideas, at least until they turn into realities -- I think many other readers here are the same. Since I don't feel it automatically, quantifying "how weird" or "how scary" these things are to other people takes a real conscious effort; I forget to do it and I'm not good at it either.
So that's how it happens.
I like entertaining ideas that others find weird and scary, too, and I don't mind that they're "weird". I have nothing against it. Even though my initial reaction was "Does this guy support terrorism?" I was calm enough to investigate and discover that no, he does not support terrorism.
Yeah, I relate to this. Not on this particular piece though. I'm having total hindsight bias about it, too. I am like "But I see this, how the heck is it not obvious to everyone else!?"
You know what? I think it might be amount of familiarity with Gwern. I'm new and I've read some of Gwern's stuff but I hadn't encountered his "Terrorism isn't effective" piece, so I didn't have any reason to believe Gwern is against terrorism.
Maybe you guys automatically interpreted Gwern's writing within the context of knowing him, and I didn't...