This is needlessly inflammatory, far to overconfident and, as it turned out, wrong. Making deductions about intent from their writing is not nearly as easy as you seem to think. Making wild accusations of nefarious attempts to insert subtext critical of you and your interests - indeed all our interests - makes you look hostile, paranoid and irrational, and for good reason.
To put it as politely as I can manage, this reply, being a reply to something so many months old, strikes me as odd. If my memory from that far back serves me (and I don't expect reliability of anyone's memory over that period) this post was one of a series of three within the space of a week by the author with a common theme.
The comment you are replying to is also in response to a post that has been fundamentally edited in response to this (and other) feedback. Apart from making judgement of the appropriateness of a reply difficult this is also a rare example of someone (aaronsw) being able to update and improve his contribution in response to feedback. Once again it is too long ago for me to remember whether I expressed appreciation and respect for aaronsw willingness to improve his post but I recall experiencing that and evaluating whether it aaronsw would consider such a comment to be positive or merely condescending.
as it turned out, wrong
That isn't something you demonstrated by making that link.
Making wild accusations of nefarious attempts to insert subtext critical of you and your interests
I don't seem to be talking about subtext critical of me of my interests at all. If you use Wei_Dai's user comments script and sort by top posts you might observe contributions that are a mix of support of SingInst and criticism of SingInst, depending on my evaluation of the object level issue in question. (The 'top contributions' sample is of course biased towards criticisms since such criticisms would be in response to, for example, Eliezer and so the conversations get more attention.) The point of this is that it is utterly absurd to be accusing me of making biased hysterical defenses of my personal interests when they aren't my interests at all.
I endorse the grandparent wholeheartedly as a response to the version of the post that it was made to and the temporal and hope that others will make similar contributions fighting against bullshit so that I can upvote them. However, since it is so long ago and especially since the post has since been improved I consider it rather counterproductive to draw attention to it.
I may have phrased that too strongly. However, I do think that your deduction regarding the original post - that it was written as an excuse to bash SI - is incompatible with the evidence as it stands and as it stood then, and should not have been presented in such a hostile manner. I appreciate this was some time ago, but it does seem like a good chance for calibration and so on. I know I have made similar mistakes.
...To put it as politely as I can manage, this reply, being a reply to something so many months old, strikes me as odd. If my memory from that
When Richard Feynman started investigating irrationality in the 1970s, he quickly begun to realize the problem wasn't limited to the obvious irrationalists.
Uri Geller claimed he could bend keys with his mind. But was he really any different from the academics who insisted their special techniques could teach children to read? Both failed the crucial scientific test of skeptical experiment: Geller's keys failed to bend in Feynman's hands; outside tests showed the new techniques only caused reading scores to go down.
What mattered was not how smart the people were, or whether they wore lab coats or used long words, but whether they followed what he concluded was the crucial principle of truly scientific thought: "a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards" to prove yourself wrong. In a word: self-skepticism.
As Feynman wrote, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." Our beliefs always seem correct to us -- after all, that's why they're our beliefs -- so we have to work extra-hard to try to prove them wrong. This means constantly looking for ways to test them against reality and to think of reasons our tests might be insufficient.
When I think of the most rational people I know, it's this quality of theirs that's most pronounced. They are constantly trying to prove themselves wrong -- they attack their beliefs with everything they can find and when they run out of weapons they go out and search for more. The result is that by the time I come around, they not only acknowledge all my criticisms but propose several more I hadn't even thought of.
And when I think of the least rational people I know, what's striking is how they do the exact opposite: instead of viciously attacking their beliefs, they try desperately to defend them. They too have responses to all my critiques, but instead of acknowledging and agreeing, they viciously attack my critique so it never touches their precious belief.
Since these two can be hard to distinguish, it's best to look at some examples. The Cochrane Collaboration argues that support from hospital nurses may be helpful in getting people to quit smoking. How do they know that? you might ask. Well, they found this was the result from doing a meta-analysis of 31 different studies. But maybe they chose a biased selection of studies? Well, they systematically searched "MEDLINE, EMBASE and PsycINFO [along with] hand searching of specialist journals, conference proceedings, and reference lists of previous trials and overviews." But did the studies they pick suffer from selection bias? Well, they searched for that -- along with three other kinds of systematic bias. And so on. But even after all this careful work, they still only are confident enough to conclude "the results…support a modest but positive effect…with caution … these meta-analysis findings need to be interpreted carefully in light of the methodological limitations".
Compare this to the Heritage Foundation's argument for the bipartisan Wyden–Ryan premium support plan. Their report also discusses lots of objections to the proposal, but confidently knocks down each one: "this analysis relies on two highly implausible assumptions ... All these predictions were dead wrong. ... this perspective completely ignores the history of Medicare" Their conclusion is similarly confident: "The arguments used by opponents of premium support are weak and flawed." Apparently there's just not a single reason to be cautious about their enormous government policy proposal!
Now, of course, the Cochrane authors might be secretly quite confident and the Heritage Foundation might be wringing their hands with self-skepticism behind-the-scenes. But let's imagine for a moment that these aren't just reportes intended to persuade others of a belief and instead accurate portrayals of how these two different groups approached the question. Now ask: which style of thinking is more likely to lead the authors to the right answer? Which attitude seems more like Richard Feynman? Which seems more like Uri Geller?