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buybuydandavis comments on Narcissistic Contrarianism - Less Wrong Discussion
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To break a little bad news, calling yourself "intellectually compulsive" really isn't complimenting yourself.
The Official Ideology is that a concern for the truth is an overriding value, quite like how purity and obeying God are overriding values to the religious. In the Official Ideology, what everyone professes to believe, there is a certain status given to zealots for Truth, just as there is a certain status given to zealots for God.
Stripped of the ideology, ideas are a means to accomplishing things in the world. Indulging in a compulsion to tidy them up regardless of any intent or plan to use them is intellectual OCD, mental masturbation, or both, depending on the precise drive/reward structure of the compulsion.
Well, as you yourself say, you're kind of intellectually compulsive, so that you have the diligence of the zealot, and wouldn't be one of the less diligent who stop when their arguments stop winning, or the even less diligent, who just don't care if their arguments win or not.
I'd note that I've been following the Official Ideology by characterizing the compulsion to tidy up ideas as "diligence". Engaging in compulsive activity is not diligence. The road to recovery is long for Ideaholics.
Generally I expect (and get) a higher quality of sarcasm than this from LW.
In your prev. post to which I was responding -- headed "Not everything is signaling", you seemed to be reading me as thinking everything is signalling,
In saying
It seemed like you might be promoting being "intellectually compulsive" with the withering clause "No doubt that attitude is hard for those who do [my interp: mostly preoccupy themselves with presenting an image] to comprehend". I hope you can see why I inferred that the "intellectually compulsive" were a superior fraternity to those who "mostly preoccupy themselves with presenting an image".
But it seems that by your lights, the intellectually compulsive are trumped by those who know that
So would that be your characterization of those involved in pure mathematics? To say nothing of those who spent centuries collating tables of apparent (as seen from position x,y on earth on x date/time) positions of the planets against the backdrop of the fixed stars which became the raw data for validating Kepler's and Newton's theses. Were they OCD mental masturbators whose lives were wasted?
I think perhaps you are spending an inordinate amount of effort making other writers seem like silly straw men. I would suggest you primarily read posts that you can respect, and bother to understand and engage with. I am being serious here, trying not to engage in mere putdown-ism.