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James_Miller comments on What are "the really good ideas" that Peter Thiel says are too dangerous to mention? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's inappropriate for you to bring up the possibility that my post might harm Thiel, and then when I respond say that you are not "invested" in whether Thiel will be harmed.
Color me unimpressed. Both of them can be perfectly true and valid at once. He's some random guy I don't know and he didn't ask for this, therefore I'm going to consider whether other people could put words in his mouth, just because it's common courtesy and I don't have a reason to wish him bad. At the same time I'm not his PR specialist. If the opposite of what he ostensibly expressed is true, and it's a publicity stunt, then it doesn't follow that I should be okay with someone using LW at large to gain support for him. So yes, I'm not invested in his success, no scare quotes. I don't get paid if more people agree with him. Precisely the position of a neutral observer, biased only by the fact that I do care about not giving the political trolls of LessWrong a venue for expressing themselves.
More abstractly, saying X is true, and then when something claims it's not true, responding with "well I don't care about X" is very bad form in a debate because if you don't care about X you should not have brought it up.
My point was that there are degrees of caring*, and that caring does depend** on how sincere a person is when claiming not to want to draw attention to one of their points.
* = going from "I don't give a fuck" to "this is my best friend we're talking about / I'm paid to give a fuck", on which spectrum I took the middle position.
** = they don't want to draw attention to it, fine, let's respect their wishes. Oh, they were playing reverse psychology on me? Screw them then.
There's no point in trying to get me to express a plainly pro- or anti-Thiel opinion.