A month or so ago I stumbled across this. It's a blog piece by one Robert Lanza M.D., a legitimate, respected biologist who has made important contributions to tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research. In his spare time, he is a crackpot.
I know I shouldn't give any of my time to an online pop-psychology magazine which has "Find a Therapist" as the second option on its navigation bar, but the piece in question could have been *designed* to antagonise a LessWrong reader: horrible misapplication of quantum physics, worshipful treatment of the mysterious, making a big deal over easily dissolvable questions, bold and unsubstantiated claims about physics and consciousness... the list goes on. I'm generally past the point in my life where ranting at people who are wrong on the internet holds any appeal, but this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.
If reading LW all these years has done anything, it's trained me to take apart that post without even thinking, so (and I'm not proud of this), I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau. It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.
But this started me thinking about how certain things (either subjects or people) antagonise what I now think of as my LessWrong Parts, or more generally cause me distress on an epistemic level, and what my subjective experience of that distress is like so I can recognise and deal with it in future.
I've seen a few other people make comments describing this kind of distress, (this description of "being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them" seems particularly accurate). Common culprits seem to be critical theory, postmodernism and bad philosophy. I've also noticed some people distress me in this fashion, in a way I'm still struggling to characterise.
Who else has this experience? Do you have any choice examples? What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?
Invest in people proportionate to your expected return. Your prior on returns should be very low, most people are a waste of time and resources (Specifically for this particular example, your investment was your emotional reactance to things they do). Low but still positive, so you invest a tiny bit and watch what happens. If you actually get some returns great! Repeat with a slightly larger investment. Otherwise start with a new person.
Your anger is understandable, things are more frustrating when they are close to awesome but then fail in a stupid way than things that were never awesome. These "almost awesome" things give you a glimpse of something amazing before snatching it away. Even though our platonic awesome thing never really existed we still feel loss.
Unless the argument itself is the part you get returns from. I've long admitted that arguing on the internet is utterly pointless. But so is watching TV or playing video games, and this at least makes me smarter sometimes.