- * I got offended; I complained in Discord that this amounted to giving up on the concept of intellectual honesty ; davis-amounts-to-giving-up-on-the-concept-of-intellectual-honesty.png
- * He put a checkmark on it.
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+I got offended. I said that I felt like a devout Catholic watching the Pope say, "Jesus sucks; I hate God; I never should have told people about God."
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+Later, I felt the need to write another message clarifying exactly what I found offensive. The problem wasn't the condescension of the suggestion that other people couldn't reason. People being annoyed at the condescension was fine. The _problem_ was that just learning to persuade people of things instead was giving up on deep hidden-structure-of-normative-reasoning principle, that the arguments you use to convince others should be the same as the ones you used to decide which conclusion to argue for. Giving up on that amounted to giving up on the _concept_ of intellectual honesty, choosing instead to become a propaganda AI that calculates what signals to output in order to manipulate an agentless world.
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+[He put a check-mark emoji on it](davis-amounts-to-giving-up-on-the-concept-of-intellectual-honesty.png), indicating agreement or approval.
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+If the caliph has lost his faith in the power of intellectual honesty, I can't necessarily say he's wrong on the empirical merits. It is written that our world is [beyond the reach of God](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god); there's no law of physics that says honesty must yield better results than propaganda.