Yudkowsky's pretension to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions isn't credible: if you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
-(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and world-class public intellectuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky feel obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
+(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
+
+[TODO—another example from the November 2018 thread—
+
+> I find the "(chromosomes?)" here very amusing. I am also a Yudkowskian, Eliezer; "female human" is a cluster in thingspace :)
+https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792
+
+]
[TODO outlining remainder of coda—]
-Still, having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb on this issue, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably Yudkowsky cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting out such blatantly one-sided propaganda? Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He explains in the Facebook comments](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228):
+Still, having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb on this issue, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably Yudkowsky cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting out such blatantly one-sided propaganda [TODO: rephrase]? Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He explains in the Facebook comments](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228):
> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.
-Ah, personal _prudence_! He continues:
+Ah, _prudence_! He continues:
> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff