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Giles comments on How to offend a rationalist (who hasn't thought about it yet): a life lesson - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: mszegedy 06 February 2013 07:22AM

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Comment author: Giles 06 February 2013 07:19:38PM *  1 point [-]

2 sounds wrong to me - like you're trying to explain why having a consistent internal belief structure is important to someone who already believes that.

The things which would occur to me are:

  • If both of you are having reactions like this then you're dealing with status, in-group and out-group stuff, taking offense, etc. If you can make it not be about that and be about the philosophical issues - if you can both get curious - then that's great. But I don't know how to make that happen.
  • Does your friend actually have any contradictory beliefs? Do they believe that they do?
  • You could escalate - point out every time your friend applies a math thing to social justice. "2000 people? That's counting. You're applying a math thing there." "You think this is better than that? That's called a partial ordering and it's a math thing". I'm not sure I'd recommend this approach though.
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