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Phlebas comments on Practicing what you preach - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: TwistingFingers 23 October 2011 06:12PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2011 08:36:44PM 3 points [-]

I checked TwistingFingers's post history, and I noticed that he is also the author of a post entitled LessWrong gaming community.

Choice quote: "Many of us enjoy expressing ourselves through electronic games."

Quite how this squares with his aspiration to become an optimization process is beyond me. Optimizing for lulz, maybe.

Comment author: orthonormal 23 October 2011 10:49:07PM 9 points [-]

This is DH1.

(I also see the OP as more signal than noise. But the norm for rebuttal here should usually be DH4 or higher.)

Comment author: wedrifid 24 October 2011 01:26:02PM 6 points [-]

But the norm for rebuttal here should usually be DH4 or higher

Not everything need be a rebuttal.

Incidentally, people constrained to DH4 or higher are gameable by common social practice.

Comment author: fiddlemath 26 October 2011 07:04:26AM *  0 points [-]

Not everything need be a rebuttal.

Certainly, not every reply needs to be a rebuttal. But it usually is, here.

On the other hand, if you're going to rebut, and you think the other party is trying to argue honestly, your lower bound really should be around DH4 (counterargument) in a setting with many speakers. In a private setting, simply disagreeing (DH3) can be useful to just explain internal state. "I disagree with X, but I'm not sure why. Hm..." But it's logically rude to state simple disagreement as if it were an actual argument. :)

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2011 11:05:26PM 2 points [-]

DH1: Ad Hominem

It wasn't intended as a rebuttal; I have already provided that in another lengthy comment.

I was merely identifying TwistingFingers as a blatant troll. Just for fun:

Date: 26 September 2011

Many of us enjoy expressing ourselves through electronic games. As such, I feel that this aspect of our lives should be shared among our fellow gamers in the LessWrong community.

Juxtapose that with "Just do something: every moment you sit hundreds of thousands are dying and billions are suffering" written less than one month later.

Video games are a great way to reduce compartmentalization and learn real-world rationality skills.

Applause light/ more claims without evidence.

Indeed, what brings us together at LessWrong can often be our love of games; someone in the LessWrong community without this advantage might find learning rationality difficult [my italics].

An utterly ludicrous implication.

In this light, outreach into the transhumanist/rationalist community to promote gaming is low-hanging fruit for serving the future of humanity.

This sounds like Chomskybot applied to Lesswrong jargon.

Please consider this post a unique opportunity to begin discussion of this important issue and facilitate further debate in the near future.

Can you really not see that this guy is taking the Mickey?

Comment author: orthonormal 24 October 2011 01:07:04AM 5 points [-]

Another plausible interpretation of TF's flip-flopping is that a month ago, xe was here because xe thought it was a fun community, and then xe got "converted" into an earnestly zealous and quite naive Singularitarian. Much of TF's vitriol, then, would implicitly target xer lackadaisical past self in order to (consciously or unconsciously) distance xer current self from the pre-conversion self.

Mind you, I'm not checking TF's history myself, so this might be a bad guess. I'm just pointing out a pretty plausible alternate hypothesis.

Comment author: Prismattic 23 October 2011 11:53:06PM 5 points [-]

Can you really not see that this guy is taking the Mickey?

I realize that this a trivial issue, but if you care about inferential distance, I thought you should know that I had to look this expression up, and I suspect a lot of other non-UK readers would as well.

Comment author: ahartell 24 October 2011 12:43:11AM 3 points [-]

For those who don't know, Urban Dictionary says that "taking the Mickey" means "joking, or doing something without intent".

Comment author: FiftyTwo 24 October 2011 10:35:43PM 1 point [-]

(I rather like this system of using DH shorthands for diagnosing the problems with peoples comments. Possibly we can develop similar systems for other logical issues.)