And to think that it all began with a vague uncomfortable feeling and a desire to understand!

You might be interested in Thinking at the Edge-- it's the only system I know of for getting cognitive value out of those vague feelings.

Because most people think that when they read an article they either agree or disagree and that's pretty clear the moment they read the article.

The idea that the article contains a parable that creates cognitive change with a time lack of a day, week, month or year isn't in the common understanding of cognition. It's not a phenomena that's well studied.

That means there a lot of claims on the subject for which people would want proof but no scientific studies to back up those claims.

I just read Dune and it contains the description of a character:

It was obvious that Fenring seldom did anything he felt to be unnecessary, or used two words where one would do, or held himself to a single meaning in a single phrase.

Speaking in that way where phrases generally have more than one meaning is not easy when you try to make complex arguments that are defensible.

Interesting. I understand how you arrived at that. The sequences and esp. EYs posts are often written in that style. But you don't need to write that way (actually I don't think you succeeded at that). My first tries were also somewhat trying to fit in but overdoing it - and somewhat failing too. Good luck. TRrying and failing is better than not trying and thus not learning.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dg7/what_have_you_recently_tried_and_failed_at/

Post needs an executive summary / abstract

LW is quite diverse. There are a lot of different people with different views.

On first glance your post looked like it was written by someone who lacks the ability to write clearly. At second glance it looks like it's simply the product of deconstrutivist thinking and therefore not easily accessible.

I'm not sure that the way a few terms get used here is clear to you.

Economists started to speak about rational agents when they mean an agent that optimizes it's actions according to an utility function. In those models it's not important whether or not the agent has reasons for his decisions that he can articulate. On LW we use a notion of rationality that's derived from that idea. Rationality is using a systemized process which has maximizes utility.

In retrospect I'm not sure whether that's a good way to use the word, but it's the way it's evolved in this community. Here it's not about engaging in an action that can be rationalized.

Parables do happen to be a nice tool but it's a tool that's not easily understood. Cognitive Science suggests that our naive intuitions about what parables do are not good.

Eliezer recently wrote on facebook:

I don't know the status of informed debate on whether there was a real person corresponding to Buddha at the start of Buddhism, but if there was, telling the mythology as if Buddha stood up from under a tree containing the entire idea, and furthermore woke up with the ability to explain it using parables that people needed to have faith in and would only fully appreciate years later, did a tremendous disservice to Buddhism.

The concept that deep parables do exist and do things with time lags of a year does get acknowledged by Eliezer. On the other hand we lack any good theory. If you read HPMOR with a critical eye you see that it's full of parables.

The problem of parables is that it's hard to talk about them directly.

So the encoding was probably not the problem

The main problem was most likely that your text was full of nonbreaking spaces. A conversion to actual ASCII would have got rid of those because the (rather limited) ASCII character repertoire doesn't include nonbreaking spaces. I doubt that using an "ANSI" character set did that, though, so yes, the encoding was probably a red herring.

does the GUI read ASCII and ANSI?

What GUI?

what encoding is used for copy and pasting text?

That would be an implementation detail of your operating system; if it's competently implemented (which I think pretty much everything is these days) you should think of what's copied and pasted as being made up of characters, not of the numbers used to encode them.

However, at least on some systems, if you copy from one application that supports (not just plain text but) formatted text into another, the formatting will be (at least roughly) preserved. This will happen, e.g., if you copy and paste from a web browser into Microsoft Word. I find that this is scarcely ever what I want. There's usually a way to paste in just the text (sometimes categorized as "Paste Special", which may offer other less-common options for pasting stuff too).

Agreed that your post is impressively mindful. In terms of writing style, maybe try writing more like Steven Pinker or Paul Graham. (If you've haven't read Paul Graham yet, the low-hanging fruit here is to go to his essays page and read a few essays that appeal to you, then copy that style as closely as possible. Here are some favorites of mine. Paul Graham is great at both writing and thinking so you'll do triple duty learning about writing, thinking, and also whatever idea he's trying to communicate.)

On first glance your post looked like it was written by someone who lacks the ability to write clearly. At second glance it looks like it's simply the product of deconstrutivist thinking and therefore not easily accessible.

I'm not sure that the way a few terms get used here is clear to you.

Economists started to speak about rational agents when they mean an agent that optimizes it's actions according to an utility function. In those models it's not important whether or not the agent has reasons for his decisions that he can articulate. On LW we use a notion of rationality that's derived from that idea. Rationality is using a systemized process which has maximizes utility.

In retrospect I'm not sure whether that's a good way to use the word, but it's the way it's evolved in this community. Here it's not about engaging in an action that can be rationalized.

Parables do happen to be a nice tool but it's a tool that's not easily understood. Cognitive Science suggests that our naive intuitions about what parables do are not good.

Eliezer recently wrote on facebook:

I don't know the status of informed debate on whether there was a real person corresponding to Buddha at the start of Buddhism, but if there was, telling the mythology as if Buddha stood up from under a tree containing the entire idea, and furthermore woke up with the ability to explain it using parables that people needed to have faith in and would only fully appreciate years later, did a tremendous disservice to Buddhism.

The concept that deep parables do exist and do things with time lags of a year does get acknowledged by Eliezer. On the other hand we lack any good theory. If you read HPMOR with a critical eye you see that it's full of parables.

The problem of parables is that it's hard to talk about them directly.

I found the post extremely difficult to read and to understand the point. From the last section I concluded that you are saying that biases are necessary for some reason? I am still not sure what you are giving as a reason for this.