A month or so ago I stumbled across this. It's a blog piece by one Robert Lanza M.D., a legitimate, respected biologist who has made important contributions to tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research. In his spare time, he is a crackpot.
I know I shouldn't give any of my time to an online pop-psychology magazine which has "Find a Therapist" as the second option on its navigation bar, but the piece in question could have been *designed* to antagonise a LessWrong reader: horrible misapplication of quantum physics, worshipful treatment of the mysterious, making a big deal over easily dissolvable questions, bold and unsubstantiated claims about physics and consciousness... the list goes on. I'm generally past the point in my life where ranting at people who are wrong on the internet holds any appeal, but this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.
If reading LW all these years has done anything, it's trained me to take apart that post without even thinking, so (and I'm not proud of this), I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau. It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.
But this started me thinking about how certain things (either subjects or people) antagonise what I now think of as my LessWrong Parts, or more generally cause me distress on an epistemic level, and what my subjective experience of that distress is like so I can recognise and deal with it in future.
I've seen a few other people make comments describing this kind of distress, (this description of "being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them" seems particularly accurate). Common culprits seem to be critical theory, postmodernism and bad philosophy. I've also noticed some people distress me in this fashion, in a way I'm still struggling to characterise.
Who else has this experience? Do you have any choice examples? What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?
A world where this accurately describes reality, rather than one where it doesn't, is one where 1) most people consent, more or less, to the idea that they should pay their debts, 2) indebtedness is stigmatized, 3) debt is seen primarily as a relationship between individuals, 4) the indebted are less likely to be politically active than they would if they were not indebted, ..., &c. It's intended to resonate with one's phenomenal experience and background assumptions, and no, it doesn't attempt much more than that, so like I said, it's a bad argument.
This may sound like a glib remark, and it is, but it's also a legitimate query: where are they hiding all the good arguments?
My lit-crit friend, a Ph.D. student herself, presumably provided this example in the misguided hope that it would offer an insight into the value of her way of thinking. Was it just a bad choice on her part? Is there some secret trove of critical theory observations on debt that I might look at and think "woah! This is knowledge worth having"?