samath comments on Discussion of Slate Star Codex: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice" - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Artaxerxes 28 March 2015 09:17AM

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Comment author: Jiro 30 March 2015 05:09:11AM *  4 points [-]

The fantasy isn't mainly that Robertson likes torturing atheists or thinks his audience does. The fantasy is that their own atheism is responsible for them being tortured and that the awfulness of that demonstrates that atheism is awful. Whether his audience likes hearing about atheists suffering is a side issue.

.You don't promote the Holocaust by talking about how much pain the Jews would suffer in concentration camps.

That's a bad comparison because Nazis did not believe that Jews could or should give up being Jews.

Comment author: samath 30 March 2015 02:41:41PM 5 points [-]

Hmmm, I think a better word than "fantasy" here is "dystopia." Robertson is painting a bleak picture of a world where without moral authority, like the (much longer) bleak depiction of say, Fahrenheit 451 of a world without intellectual freedoms. Again, the natural reaction to reading Fahrenheit 451 or hearing Robertson isn't gleeful cackling, but shocked horror. "Something ain't right."