Why is the goal people over paper clips?

Why do you need justification on this? Would you exchange lifes of your friends or relatives for a ton of paperclips?

Professing agreement or disagreement with a broad set of rather unrelated ideas is not conductive to productive discussion because there is no single topic to concentrate on with object-level arguments. Having the set of ideas defined by their author brings in tribal political instincts, which too is not helpful. You are right that the post was formulated as agreement with the Sequences rather than with everything which Yudkowsky ever said but I don't see how this distinction is important. "Everything which Yudkowsky ever said" would also denote a set of ideas, after all.

But if someone didn't know about P-violation and couldn't see us, the only ‘definitions’ they could possibly give would be ones based on said contingent facts.

That's an unfortunate fact about impossibility to faithfully communicate the meaning of some terms in certain circumstances, not about the meaning itself.

"Right" has several meanings and can be analysed as several different words: "right.1" means "conservative" (identical to "right.1"), "right.2" means "at the end of a sentence" (identical to "right.2"), "right.3" means "correct" (identical to "right.3") while "right.4" means "left", i.e. opposite to "right.4". Historically they were the same word which acquired metaphorical meanings because certain contingent facts, but now practically we have distinct homonyms and would better specify which is the one we are talking about.

Well, if you asked someone living before parity violation was discovered who can't see you what they meant by “left”, they could have answered, say, “the side where most people have their hearts”, or “the side other than that where most people have the hand they usually use to write”, and those would be true of left on the other planet, too.

They can answer that after parity violation was discovered, even if they could see us, and it would still be true. Those are true sentences about "left" or "left", but not complete descriptions of their meaning. When I ask you what you mean by "bus", you can truthfully answer that it's "a vehicle used for mass transportation of people" and another person can say the same about "train", but that doesn't imply that your "bus" is synonymous to the other person's "train".

Also don't forget to translate (or italicise) other words. "Most people have hearts on the left" is true as well as "most people have hearts on the left", but "most people have hearts on the left" or "most people have hearts on the left" are false. (If "people" is used to denote the populations of both mirror worlds then all given sentences are false.)

And if you gave a Putnamian twin-earther nothing but H2O to drink for a day, they'd still be thirsty (and possibly even worse, depending on the details of Putnam's thought experiment).

Is it really the case? I am not much familiar with Putnam, but I had thought that XYZ was supposed to be indistinguishable from H2O by any accessible means.

What is wrong, that the job of philosophy is to clear up conceptual confusions, or that philosophy could not conflict with science?

I feel like I'm the only person pointing out that Putnam and the rest are arguing the acoustics of unheard falling trees.

One person pointing it out suffices. (I tend to agree with your position.)

Well, 'left' means 'right' and 'right' means 'left', right? That their macroscopic world is a parity-inverted copy of ours (and that their word for 'left' souds the same as our word for 'right') is an unfortunate confusing accident, but I don't see how it would justify translating 'left' as 'left'. The representation of 'left' in their brains is not the same as the representation of 'left' in our brains, as demonstrated by different reactions to same sensory inputs. If you show the twin-earther your left hand they would say "it's your right hand". In the H2O-XYZ counterfactual the mental representations could be the same, thus Putnam's experiment is different from yours.

You are right, but there is probably some misunderstanding. That the personal considerations should be ignored when assessing probability of an idea, and that one shouldn't express collective agreement with ideas based on their author, are different suggestions. You argue against the former while I was stating the latter.

It's important to take into account the context. When an idea X is being questioned, saying "I agree with X, because a very trustworthy person Y agrees with X" is fine with me, although it isn't the best sort of argument one could provide. Starting the discussion "I agree with X1, X2, X3, ... Xn", on the other hand, makes any reasonable debate almost impossible, since it is not practical to argue n distinct ideas at once.

If I intended to encode my beliefs (which I don't), I couldn't, because I don't:

• know what's the precise difference between 0 and 1
• understand 2 - what's total reductionism, especially in contrast to ordinary reductionism
• see any novel insight in 9, which leads me to suspect I am missing the point

Wouldn't it be better if the professed agreement was agreement with ideas rather than with people? The dissent counterpart of this post would say "I disagree with everything what this person says". That's clearly pathological.