Vaniver comments on EY "Politics is the Mind Killer" sighting at Washington Examiner and Reason.com - Less Wrong

19 Post author: buybuydandavis 27 September 2012 07:48PM

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Comment author: JKuznicki 28 September 2012 06:08:43PM 30 points [-]

I'm the editor of Cato Unbound, and I've been a fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky's for several years. I'm fairly sure that I introduced Gene to his work as well.

There is no real story behind the article. There almost never is, with me. It's just my job to identify interesting and talented writers, and to pay them to write for us. He was overwhelmingly qualified. I asked, and he accepted.

Comment author: Vaniver 28 September 2012 08:00:22PM 4 points [-]

Thanks for responding! Do you remember how you found EY in the first place?

Comment author: JKuznicki 01 October 2012 06:26:19PM 7 points [-]

Every semester I teach the Cato Institute's intern class about elementary forms of argument, logical fallacies, and the like. Something must have clicked for one of the interns, because she asked me what I thought of EY. She recommended some of his papers.

Well. He was totally unknown to me then, but I've since added Less Wrong to the sites that I recommend in the talk.

I've lurked extensively around here for quite a while, and what disagreements I have with the community consensus are so minor as not to need bothering about. (I'm a bit more of a fatalist about the matter of my own death, for example, in that I personally doubt that I will live a longer lifespan than a typical human has so far. But anyway.)

Keep up the good work, folks. Both my husband (SRStarin) and I always come away from Less Wrong with a lot of great stuff to think and talk about.