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orthonormal comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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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.