Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alejandro1 03 August 2012 03:33PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 August 2012 08:04:59PM 5 points [-]

Shouldn't you be taking into account that I don't want to discourage other people from having kids?

Comment author: philh 20 August 2012 08:39:21PM 9 points [-]

That might just be because you eat babies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 August 2012 08:20:18PM 1 point [-]

But you're afraid that if you state your reason, it will discourage others from having kids.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 20 August 2012 11:13:04PM 6 points [-]

All that means is that he is aware of the halo effect. People who have enjoyed or learned from his work will give his reasons undue weight as a consequence, even if they don't actually apply to them.

Comment author: DaFranker 20 August 2012 08:53:15PM *  1 point [-]

Unfortunately, that seems to be a malleable argument. Which way your stating that (you don't want to disclose your reasons for not wanting to have kids) will influence audiences seems like it will depend heavily on their priors for how generally-valid-to-any-other-person this reason might be, and for how self-motivated both the not-wanting-to-have-kids and the not-wanting-to-discourage-others could be.

Then again, I might be missing some key pieces of context. No offense intended, but I try to make it a point not to follow your actions and gobble up your words personally, even to the point of mind-imaging a computer-generated mental voice when reading the sequences. I've already been burned pretty hard by blindly reaching for a role-model I was too fond of.