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mkf comments on Stupid Questions May 2015 - Less Wrong
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Comments (263)
The Lesswrong-like answer to whether a blue egg containing Palladium is indeed a blegg is "It depends on what your disguised query is".
If the disguised query is which pronoun you should use, I don't see any compelling reason not use the word that the person in question prefers. If you insist on using the pronoun associated with whatever disguised query you associate with sex/gender, this is at best an example of "defecting by accident".
By the way, it is one of the best examples I've seen of quick, practical gains from reading LW: the ability to sort out problems like this.
This. After reading the Sequences, many things that seemed like "important complicated questions" before are now reclassified as "obvious confusions in thinking".
Even before reading Sequences I was already kinda supsicious that something is wrong when the long debates on such questions do not lead to meaningful answers, despite the questions do not contain any difficult math or any experimentally expensive facts. But I couldn't transform this suspicion into an explanation of what exactly was wrong; so I didn't feel certain about it myself.
After reading Sequences, many "deep problems" became "yet another case of someone confusing a map with the territory". -- But the important thing is not merely learning that the password is "map is not the territory", but the technical details of how specifically the maps are built, and how specifically the artifacts arise on those maps.
Sounds a lot like General Semantics, at least, Eric S. Raymond derived something similar based on GS. Example: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=161
Yes, it is derived from General Semantics. I haven't read the original, so I do not know how much to credit Eliezer for making the original ideas easier to read. But I credit him for bringing the ideas to my attention.