Aleksei_Riikonen comments on Article about LW: Faith, Hope, and Singularity: Entering the Matrix with New York’s Futurist Set - Less Wrong

31 Post author: malo 25 July 2012 07:28PM

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Comment author: Aleksei_Riikonen 25 July 2012 10:32:39PM 10 points [-]

Though it's possible the reporter has twisted your words more than I manage to suspect, I'll say:

Wow, some of the people involved really suck at thinking (or caring to think) about how they make the scene look. I think I'm able to pretty well correct for the discrepancy between what's reported and what's the reality behind it, but even after the correction, this window into what the scene has become has further lowered my interest in flying over there to the States to hang out with you, since it seems I might end up banging my head against the wall in frustration for all the silliness that's required for this sort of reporting to get it's source material.

(Though I do also think that it's inevitable that once the scene has grown to be large and successful enough, typical members will be sufficiently ordinary human beings that I'd find their company very frustrating. Sorry, I'm a dick that way, and in a sense my negative reaction is only a sign of success, though I didn't expect quite this level of success to be reached yet.)

(By the previous I however do not mean to imply that things would have been saner 10 years ago (I certainly had significant shortcomings of my own), but back when nobody had figured much anything out yet or written Sequences about stuff, the expected level of insanity would have been partly higher for such reasons.)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 July 2012 09:27:50PM 16 points [-]

Though it's possible the reporter has twisted your words more than I manage to suspect

D'you think? You'll understand better after being reported-on yourself; and then you'll look back and laugh about how very, very naive that comment was. It's the average person's incomprehension of reporter-distorting that gives reporters their power. If you read something and ask, "Hm, I wonder what the truth was that generated this piece?" without having personal, direct experience of how very bad it is, they win.

I think the winning move is to read blogs by smart people, who usually don't lie, rather than anything in newspapers.

Comment author: Aleksei_Riikonen 26 July 2012 10:57:44PM 10 points [-]

Actually, I feel that I have sufficient experience of being reported on (including in an unpleasant way), and it is precisely that which (along with my independent knowledge of many of the people getting reported on here) gave me the confidence to suspect that I would have managed to separate from the distortions an amount of information that described reality.

That said, there is a bit of fail with regard to whether I managed to communicate what precisely impacted me. Much of it is subtle, necessarily, since it had to be picked up through the distortion field, and I do allow for the possibility that I misread, but I continue to think that I'm much better at correcting for the distortion field than most people.

One thing I didn't realize, however, is that you folks apparently didn't think the gal might be a reporter. That's of course a fail in itself, but certainly a lesser fail than behaving similarly in the presence of a person one does manage to suspect to be a reporter.