army1987 comments on Emotional Basilisks - Less Wrong

-2 Post author: OrphanWilde 28 June 2013 09:10PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 29 June 2013 07:11:59AM *  1 point [-]

Do you have a better example in mind?

(I might have considered using something generic such as “some piece of information”, but I suspect such a post would be received very badly by LW readers, because reasons.)

But yeah, generally speaking (I'm not talking about this post in particular -- I personally had no trouble semi-automatically mentally replacing “atheism” with “some piece of information”), reading Americans write stuff like that about atheism when I happen to live in a continent where a sizeable fraction of people (probably a majority of people in my generation) are atheists and the sky hasn't fallen yet feels quite weird. (Same for other things American conservatives oppose, such as gun control.)

Comment author: wedrifid 29 June 2013 01:48:26PM 4 points [-]

Do you have a better example in mind?

No, not off the top of my head. I also don't particularly object to using this example. I do oppose prohibitions on fighting the hypothetical. Making this choice of hypothetical represents a form of influence. Persuasion that is immune to rebuttal is (usually) undesirable for epistemic purposes.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 July 2013 06:10:56PM *  0 points [-]

And that's not even the worst example that's been on LW! :-)