Vladimir_Nesov comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - LessWrong

31 Post author: JonahSinick 04 May 2015 05:11AM

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Comment author: JonahSinick 06 May 2015 10:40:20PM 1 point [-]

I'm knowingly breaking social norms. I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive, in the same way that Martin Luther King rejected social norms around segregation as maladaptive.

And no, I'm not going to apologize for analogizing myself to Martin Luther King on account of it coming across as a status grab: even if I'm totally inconsequential, I still identify with him strongly, and whatever other people think, it's not a status grab.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 06 May 2015 11:15:26PM 6 points [-]

I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive

Do you expect the social norms to accept your arguments, and should they, given the evidence (i.e. what is the role of addressing them in this context, expressing disapproval of certain responses)? That's the frustration of hard-to-communicate facts: you can (1) give up, (2) turn to the dark side and cut through your audience's epistemology with a machete, insisting that they accept the conclusion based on insufficient evidence and appeals to on-reflection irrelevant things, or (3) put in so much work that the result isn't worth the trouble.

(I personally dislike the machete more than the breaking of social norms, but that might be unusual.)