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gjm comments on In praise of gullibility? - Less Wrong Discussion

23 Post author: ahbwramc 18 June 2015 04:52AM

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Comment author: gjm 02 July 2015 08:30:07AM 0 points [-]

he didn't object to a premise, he objected to the term "sexual access to women"

Here's the most relevant bit of what he actually wrote:

This is really the issue there - because it is not about strictly defined concepts but about every kind of experience and emotion and value sloshing around inside you and other people, interpreting everything in your own light which can be utterly different from the light of other people. For example the guy who wrote that article uses the term "sexual access to women". I have no idea from what kind of a life could this come from.

"Not about strictly defined concepts". "Your own light which can be utterly different from the light of other people". "For example". "What kind of a life could this come from". The point isn't that there's something uniquely terrible about this particular term, it's that if someone finds it natural to write in such terms then they're looking at the world in a way DVH finds foreign and unpleasant and confusing.

a specific false premise

Falsity isn't (AIUI) the point. Neither is whether the term in question points to anything in reality. The point is that the whole approach -- values, underlying assumptions, etc. -- is far enough removed from DVH's that he sees no useful way of engaging with it. "When discussing human behavior you cannot really separate facts from values, and thus you need a certain kind of agreement in values."

Anyway, I'm getting rather bored of all the gratuitous downvotes so I think I'll stop now. By the way, you've missed a couple of my comments in this discussion. But I expect you'll get around to them soon, and in any case I see you've made up for it by downvoting a bunch of my old comments again.