Scott, known on LessWrong as Yvain, recently wrote a post complaining about an inaccurate rape statistic.
Arthur Chu, who is notable for winning money on Jeopardy recently, argued against Scott's stance that we should be honest in arguments in a comment thread on Jeff Kaufman's Facebook profile, which can be read here.
Scott just responded here, with a number of points relevant to the topic of rationalist communities.
I am interested in what LW thinks of this.
Obviously, at some point being polite in our arguments is silly. I'd be interested in people's opinions of how dire the real world consequences have to be before it's worthwhile debating dishonestly.
Yes.
Sucks to be them. You seem to be arguing something I've seen elsewhere, and which for the sake of definiteness I'll state in the strongest form.
No-one ever achieves anything through their own efforts. All "success" is due to privilege, which is oppression. So-called self-help is privilege used as an excuse to blame the unprivileged for their situation, which situation is in reality due to oppression by the privileged. Showing people what they can do for themselves is disempowerment. Blaming their troubles on the forces of privilege is empowerment. Individual action is vice. Collective action is virtue.
Do your thoughts point in that direction?
"A lot of thought" is not a phrase that leaps to my mind on reading that. Does any of this seeing value and problems, and having personal beliefs and opinions lead to anything but more words on blogs? I'm glad you don't think murder and arson should be freely employed, but what does it mean to say that judgement is your personal opinion? That it doesn't matter?
That paragraph sounds awful. No, I don't think that. I'll be lazy and point to John Scalzi I guess: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
I don't think that individual advice is useless. I'm skeptical that certain people are giving useful advice. Useful here involves a criterion of novelty. Giving someone advice they have heard 1000 times is not helpful. I guess necessary but not sufficient is a good description of personal effort in this context.
Working three jobs doesn't leave a lot of time to ge... (read more)