I've been trying to read through this apparently epic post every few months, and my eyes still slide over the text like it's some magic incantations only readable to the initiated. Or maybe it's just all fluff with low content, I can't tell.
I think the story might be useful for someone who is genuinely confused about what they believe / value. If you aren't confuse about those things, then I agree the story is not that useful. Perhaps another label would be intuition pump.
Like many texts-for-clarifying-thought, the failure mode of reading them is using them as a mirror for one's own beliefs. The fact that one might have a better understanding of one's preferences after reading EY's text is not strong proof that the text argues for one's preferences. By illusion-of-transparency, the piece has become highly valued even though there is no consensus as to what it means.
Given the prevalence of that failure mode, I'm not sure that this story has positive expected value across the population of likely readers.
Today's post, Final Words was originally published on 27 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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