OK, so that would mean that Nixon supporters might find the example distractingly offensive, which might well be a reason not to use it. But Eliezer said Republicans, and the two aren't quite the same.
(After Watergate I think there were rather few Nixon supporters -- meaning, in this context, people who would be offended by the suggestion that there might be anything suspect about Nixon's integrity -- even among Republicans. When did the "Nixon diamond" start being used as an example in AI?)
Sorry — I didn't mean to imply that an example had to be offensive in order to be distracting. Simply bringing up a matter of partisan conflict in the recent past can be already distracting, even if it's not personally offensive to any single reader.
Today's post, Politics is the Mind-Killer was originally published on 18 February 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Outside the Laboratory, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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