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David_Gerard comments on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough - Less Wrong
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It's a name for the style of argument: that it's not advocating people do these things, it's just saying that uFAI is a problem, slowing Moore's Law might help and by the way here's the vulnerabilities of Intel's setup. Reasonable people assume that 2 and 2 can in fact be added to make 4, even if 4 is not mentioned in the original. This is a really simple and obvious point.
Note that I am not intending to claim that the implication was Gwern's original intention (as I note way up there, I don't think it is); I'm saying it's a property of the text as rendered. And that me saying it's a property of the text is supported by multiple people adding 2 and 2 for this result, even if arguably they're adding 2 and 2 and getting 666.
It's completely orthogonal to the point that I'm making.
If somebody reads something and comes to a strange conclusion, there's got to be some sort of five-second level trigger that stops them and says, "Wait, is this really what they're saying?" The responses to the essay made it evident that there's a lot of people that failed to have that reaction in that case.
That point is completely independent from any aesthetic/ethical judgments regarding the essay itself. If you want to debate that, I suggest talking to the author, and not me.
I'd have wondered about it myself if I hadn't had prior evidence that Gwern wasn't a crazy person, so I'm not convinced that it's as obviously surface-innocuous as you feel it is. Perhaps I've been biased by hearing crazy-nerd stories (and actually going looking for them, 'cos I find them interesting). And I do think the PR disaster potential was something I would class as obvious, even if terrorist threats from web forum postings are statistically bogeyman stories.
I suspect we've reached the talking past each other stage.