Personally, April Fool’s jokes annoy me, because I keep forgetting what date it is today. But on the other hand, often these post factum posts make sense on a meta level. Not to mention, I’m not against gaslighting in Dat Ilan, because when it’s done consciously to optimize the beneficial effects (and not like with Santa), it looks like a good exercise in your distrust/doubt/critical thinking.
In this particular case, I would like to know how many people on lesswrong took it seriously, but it’s not noticeable from the comments, it doesn’t let me understand in what proportion here those who paid attention to the date, realized everything or did not want to admit it. At least I’ll write my reaction:
At the beginning I met with a set of terms in a strange combination, but since the post was upvoted, I assumed that perhaps this combination is an established fallout and / or the post is otherwise good enough that this disadvantage pays off. When mentioning capitalism, I thought that perhaps I was mistaken and there is some sympathy for some of Marx’s ideas, those that were successful. Or is this again a strange use of the term. A little further on, I remembered that I had heard that during one of the influxes of the audience on lesswrong, a bunch of people appeared who wrote and promoted meaningless combinations of terms from the chains to the top. Then I met the mention of dialectics and my confusion jumped to enormous heights, because I checked the explanations of its proponents for the sake of interest and came to the conclusion that amidst a huge amount of water lies a misunderstanding of the principles of science (crackpot index) and a completely counter-rational opinion that contradictions are on territory, not on the map. In general, before the second point, I exploded and without finishing reading went to read the comments, looking for answers to the extreme degree of confusion and trying to find out why this post still has so many likes.
But in fairness, in addition to Yudkowsky’s opinion about meaningless wisdom, I read an article “On the perception of pseudo deep thought nonsense” about the fact that Hegel’s texts look equally deep if you add and remove a particle not, as well as delete and interchange words. (This is another very negative sign about dialectics, as far as I know, it came from Hegel) And that people cannot strictly explain what it generally means, but from this they conclude that the writer owns terms from a bunch of areas of science unknown to the reader, which means he is very smart. Before reading this, I had a couple of cases where I initially perceived such sets of words as something possibly meaningful.
Personally, April Fool’s jokes annoy me, because I keep forgetting what date it is today. But on the other hand, often these post factum posts make sense on a meta level. Not to mention, I’m not against gaslighting in Dat Ilan, because when it’s done consciously to optimize the beneficial effects (and not like with Santa), it looks like a good exercise in your distrust/doubt/critical thinking. In this particular case, I would like to know how many people on lesswrong took it seriously, but it’s not noticeable from the comments, it doesn’t let me understand in what proportion here those who paid attention to the date, realized everything or did not want to admit it. At least I’ll write my reaction: At the beginning I met with a set of terms in a strange combination, but since the post was upvoted, I assumed that perhaps this combination is an established fallout and / or the post is otherwise good enough that this disadvantage pays off. When mentioning capitalism, I thought that perhaps I was mistaken and there is some sympathy for some of Marx’s ideas, those that were successful. Or is this again a strange use of the term. A little further on, I remembered that I had heard that during one of the influxes of the audience on lesswrong, a bunch of people appeared who wrote and promoted meaningless combinations of terms from the chains to the top. Then I met the mention of dialectics and my confusion jumped to enormous heights, because I checked the explanations of its proponents for the sake of interest and came to the conclusion that amidst a huge amount of water lies a misunderstanding of the principles of science (crackpot index) and a completely counter-rational opinion that contradictions are on territory, not on the map. In general, before the second point, I exploded and without finishing reading went to read the comments, looking for answers to the extreme degree of confusion and trying to find out why this post still has so many likes. But in fairness, in addition to Yudkowsky’s opinion about meaningless wisdom, I read an article “On the perception of pseudo deep thought nonsense” about the fact that Hegel’s texts look equally deep if you add and remove a particle not, as well as delete and interchange words. (This is another very negative sign about dialectics, as far as I know, it came from Hegel) And that people cannot strictly explain what it generally means, but from this they conclude that the writer owns terms from a bunch of areas of science unknown to the reader, which means he is very smart. Before reading this, I had a couple of cases where I initially perceived such sets of words as something possibly meaningful.