komponisto comments on Persuasiveness vs Soundness - Less Wrong

-2 [deleted] 13 April 2009 08:43AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (19)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 April 2009 03:38:29PM 6 points [-]

Actually, the term "Dark Side Epistemology" seems to be tending towards over-generalization (being used to describe any persuasive art, say, rather than explicitly defended systematized bad rules of reasoning). "Dark Arts" isn't even a term of my own invention; someone else imported that from Harry Potter. It seems to be trending towards synonymy with "Dark Side". I may have to deprecate both terms as overly poetic and come up with something else - I'm thinking of Anti-Epistemology for systematically bad epistemology.

Comment author: komponisto 13 April 2009 11:23:08PM *  5 points [-]

I have to say that I like the term "Dark Arts". It's kind of... cute.

I enjoy the sort of warm-and-fuzzy atmosphere that poetic vocabulary like this tends to foster.