There are goals, such as fascinating an audience, for which the trappings of mysticism are useful.
There are goals, such as breaking out of fixed mental sets and opening oneself to creative insights, for which the actual practice of mysticism is useful.
I agree that Eliezer uses the former a fair bit. He may also use the latter; I wouldn't know.
The impression I'm getting is that you are not considering the two to be distinct things.
I would say that's an error.
The idea that mysticism is sometimes useful seems to be counter to popular rational thought. When I began reading Eliezer, his tendency towards the use of zen phrasing and rhetoric that was purely aesthetic put me off. I felt that it was not rational for some reason. I came to see that these trappings of mysticism did not detract from his point, but rather added to its persuasiveness.
The problem that exists in this is not that it detracts from rationality, but that the methods used to increase its allure could be used for any teaching, no matter how wrong...
Today's post, A Sense That More Is Possible was originally published on 13 March 2009. 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 Raising the Sanity Waterline, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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