I disagree quite a bit with the pattern of “there’s this true thing, but everyone around me is rounding it off to something dumb and bad, so I’m just gonna shout that the original thing is not-true, in hopes people will stop rounding-it-off”.
Like, it doesn’t even sound like you think the “real and important” part is false? Maybe you’d disagree, which would obviously be the crux there, but if this describes you, keep reading:
I don’t think it’s remotely intractable to, say, write a LessWrong post that actually convinces lots of the community to actually change their mind/extrapolation/rounding-off of an idea. Yudkowsky did it (as a knowledge popularizer) by decoupling “rationality” from “cold” and “naive”. Heck, part of my point was that SSC Scott has written multiple posts doing the exact thing for the “intelligence” topic at hand!
I get that there’s people in the community, probably a lot, who are overly worried about their own IQ. So… we should have a norm of “just boringly send people links to posts about [the topic-and-hand] that we think are true”! I’m sure, if someone wrote or dug up a good post about [why not to be racist/dickish/TheMotte about innate intelligence], we should link the right people that, too.
I disagree quite a bit with the pattern of “there’s this true thing, but everyone around me is rounding it off to something dumb and bad, so I’m just gonna shout that the original thing is not-true, in hopes people will stop rounding-it-off”.
Like, it doesn’t even sound like you think the “real and important” part is false? Maybe you’d disagree, which would obviously be the crux there, but if this describes you, keep reading:
I don’t think it’s remotely intractable to, say, write a LessWrong post that actually convinces lots of the community to actually change their mind/extrapolation/rounding-off of an idea. Yudkowsky did it (as a knowledge popularizer) by decoupling “rationality” from “cold” and “naive”. Heck, part of my point was that SSC Scott has written multiple posts doing the exact thing for the “intelligence” topic at hand!
I get that there’s people in the community, probably a lot, who are overly worried about their own IQ. So… we should have a norm of “just boringly send people links to posts about [the topic-and-hand] that we think are true”! I’m sure, if someone wrote or dug up a good post about [why not to be racist/dickish/TheMotte about innate intelligence], we should link the right people that, too.
In four words: “Just send people links.”