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lukeprog comments on Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
All readers have a Greasemonkey script that rips all the qualifying words out of a post. This is a natural fact of writing and reading.
Not the post you wrote - the post that the long-time LWer who Twittered "Eliezer's Yudkowsky's Sequences are mostly not original" read. The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable - like you're living in an authorial should-universe. Of course somebody's going to read that post and think "Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sequences are mostly not original"! Of course that's going to be the consequence of writing it! And maybe it's just because I was reading it instead of writing it myself, without having all of your intentions so prominently in my mind, but I don't see why on Earth you'd expect any other message to come across than that. A few qualifying words don't have the kind of power it takes to stop that from happening!
Do you think most readers misinterpreted my post in that way? I doubt it. It looks to me like one person tweeted "Eliezer's Sequences mostly not original" — a misinterpretation of my post which I've now explicitly denied near the top of the post.
My guess now would be that I probably underestimate the degree to which readers misinterpreted my post (because my own intentions were clear in my mind, illusion of transparency), and that you probably overestimate the degree to which readers misinterpreted my post (because you seem to have initially misinterpreted it, and that misinterpretation diminishes several years of cognitive work that you are justly proud of).
Also: you seem to be focusing on the one tweeted misinterpretation and not taking into account that we have evidence that the post is also achieving its explicitly stated goals, as evidenced by many of the comments on this thread: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.