John_Maxwell_IV comments on Financial Effectiveness Repository - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 18 November 2014 09:57AM

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Comment author: SanguineEmpiricist 18 November 2014 09:32:30PM *  3 points [-]

As usual, people completely miss the point. One of the people I respect intellectually the most is autistic, Curt Doolittle. As is one of my co-founders. Comments like this are so annoying.

They just trend towards 'objects', as opposed to 'not'. If you meet most Less Wrongers in real life you can see the extreme manifestation of this tendency.

You also notice how most, but not all of them

  • Never have been under risk/pressure their entire life and thus their 'rationality' is platonic.
  • Large divergence between their assumed online identities erudition and what you see in real life
  • These people try to give advice that has a tendency to superficially sound good, but is not well informed.
  • People who assume their intelligence and rationality as a wardrobe. Something to put on and show off, to give themselves 'smart points'. These people are the worst and make extremely advanced mistakes and have slight neurotic tendencies to engage in long arguments over and over.

This is just saying that threads like these are dangerous. You're a good example of some one who completely missed the point.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 19 November 2014 11:08:15AM 9 points [-]

As usual, people completely miss the point.

If you find that people consistently miss the point of what you're writing, you might consider working to improve your communication skills. For example, I've read this sentence several times and I'm still not sure how to parse it: "They just trend towards 'objects', as opposed to 'not'." I appreciate that you're trying to tell me what I might be doing wrong, but currently you aren't explaining yourself very clearly or convincingly, so I'm not sure if what you're saying is correct or valuable.

Comment author: gjm 19 November 2014 12:31:31PM 1 point [-]

I'm pretty sure the meaning of that sentence is: "The people I am describing are more interested in impersonal objects than in people, and cope better with impersonal objects than with people".

There may be some truth in that. But it's entirely unobvious why it should tell us anything about those people's competence to offer financial advice, and (despite SanguineEmpiricist's some-of-my-best-friends response) it's hard not to suspect an attempt to exploit the halo/horns effect. (Warning: link in previous sentence is to a RationalWiki page; RW isn't super-reliable in general but this page seems OK.)

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