anon_standards

To me, and I expect to a group of other readers as well given upvotes to my comments and those of @subconvergence, this is a direction we really think LessWrong should not go in.

I think Raemon is able to see some appeals of this post that are something like:

• Boggling at the world is good, and we don't get as much of that as we'd like
• People reading this post may be able to form their own takeaway, which is something like "man, we really should be checking more comprehensively whether dogs can talk.", and ideas like that are worth sharing.

I think there are some significant problems with this, however:

1. This post doesn't really advocate

I appreciate your response, and my apologies that for time-efficiency reasons I'm only going to respond briefly and to some parts of it.

I don't think it's fair to say my dismissal of concerns is "cursory" if you include my comments under the post. Maybe the article itself didn't go deep enough, partly I wanted it to scan well, partly I wanted to see good criticism so I could update/come up with good responses, because it's not easy to preempt every criticism.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this. I do feel as though given large claims e.g. "revolutionary" and the definite rather than the hedge in the title, it was worth doing more than the... (read 468 more words →)

This is an interesting response; mine is of the opposite valence. To me, this doesn't feel too dissimilar from something my cousin-who-is-into-pyramid-schemes would send me. I believe that this post has:

• Large claims that are not evidence supported
• Mirages of evidence that do not meaningfully constitute such
• Cursory dismissal of potential concerns

Claims that set off alarm bells to me in this post include:

• Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think
• Epistemic status: highly suggestive.
• There's a revolution going on and you're sleeping on it.
• her dog started to display capabilities for rudimentary syntax
• Once your dog gets the hang of it, you’re able to add more buttons faster, but it’s never quick. Dogs take a while to come up