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.

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.

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...