Vaniver comments on Dark Side Epistemology - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 October 2008 11:55PM

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Comment author: thomblake 19 April 2012 07:09:19PM 1 point [-]

Wait a second

Too late - it's been 3 and a half years.

(is that a word?

"epistemologically " is a word, but it's hard to tell when to instead say "epistemically".

Comment author: Vaniver 19 April 2012 07:35:00PM 4 points [-]

Too late - it's been 3 and a half years.

Somewhat amusing, but it should not be surprising that most of the commentary on old sequence posts is people reading them and engaging with the ideas for the first time.

Comment author: thomblake 19 April 2012 07:46:46PM 1 point [-]

Yes, it's the time language that got me.

Comment author: JustinMElms 22 June 2016 09:54:35PM 4 points [-]

That's ridiculous: whenever I want to comment, I always observe that I am reading 4-year-old arguments and keep on scrolling.

Comment author: Vaniver 23 June 2016 11:03:52AM 3 points [-]

An interesting claim I came across recently is that most people view the Internet as opening up the past, but that isn't quite right--the past was always accessible, through books and stories and so on. What the internet does that is strange is extend the present into the past, so that content created in 2001 or 2012 or so on can be indistinguishable from content created in 2016, if the formatting, context, or dynamics are the same.

That is, one doesn't expect Jane Austen to return any fan letters, but sometimes when you respond to a four-year old comment, you get a response within a day.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 June 2016 02:27:53PM 2 points [-]

the past was always accessible, through books and stories and so on.

I don't know if that's right. The past was always accessible to some degree, but never before as an overwhelming exhaustive array of minutiae. It's precisely because of that level of detail that this past looks so much like the present.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 23 June 2016 03:42:50PM 4 points [-]

Necro-commenting isn't usually frowned upon around here.