Well, the professed agreement of this post is with the Sequences, which are a set of ideas rather than a person, even if they were all written by one person. The dissent counterpart of this post would be “I disagree with the entire content of the sequences.”
Professing agreement or disagreement with a broad set of rather unrelated ideas is not conductive to productive discussion because there is no single topic to concentrate on with object-level arguments. Having the set of ideas defined by their author brings in tribal political instincts, which too is not helpful. You are right that the post was formulated as agreement with the Sequences rather than with everything which Yudkowsky ever said but I don’t see how this distinction is important. “Everything which Yudkowsky ever said” would also denote a set of ideas, after all.
Well, the professed agreement of this post is with the Sequences, which are a set of ideas rather than a person, even if they were all written by one person. The dissent counterpart of this post would be “I disagree with the entire content of the sequences.”
Am I misunderstanding you about something?
Professing agreement or disagreement with a broad set of rather unrelated ideas is not conductive to productive discussion because there is no single topic to concentrate on with object-level arguments. Having the set of ideas defined by their author brings in tribal political instincts, which too is not helpful. You are right that the post was formulated as agreement with the Sequences rather than with everything which Yudkowsky ever said but I don’t see how this distinction is important. “Everything which Yudkowsky ever said” would also denote a set of ideas, after all.
Albeit an internally inconsistent set, given that Yudkowsky has occasionally changed his mind about things.