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Apprentice comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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This was an attempt at humor. Usually when people start sentences with "Whatever religion we adhere to..." they are going to utter a platitude ending with "...we all believe in love/life/goodness". The intended joke was to come about through a subversion of the audience's expectation. It was also meant to poke fun at all the torture discussions here lately, though perhaps that's already been done to death.
Creative idea, poor execution. You'd have to combine it with several other such platitude parodies before other people would interpret your joke correctly.
It might not work in another month or two, but the idea of "contrived infinite-torture scenarios" has high salience for LW readers right now. I got the joke immediately.
Just because you didn't get the joke doesn't mean he did it wrong. I got the joke, and he was saying it to me, so I believe the joke was performed correctly, given his target audience! ^_^
The problem, I'd say, would be an assumption of shared prior experience - but humor in general tends to make that assumption, whether it's puns which assume a shared experience with lingual quirks, friend in-jokes which are directly about shared experiences, or genre humor which assumes a shared experience in that genre. This was genre humor.
While transparent communication is wonderful for rational discussion, I would conjecture that humor is inherently about the irrational links our minds make between disparate information with similar qualities.
I got the joke, but I guess I just didn't think it was funny. That may be because I've been pretty annoyed with all the infinite torture discussions that have been going on; I think the idea is laughably implausible, and don't understand the compulsion people seem to have to keep talking about it, even after being informed that they are causing other people horrible nightmares by doing so.