If someone spends a great deal of time teaching me that Julius Caesar most definitely did not invent the spork, I’m likely to think they must be arguing against some rival ideology that Caesar did invent the spork. Indeed, I’ll suspect there’s a whole community of Caesarosporkists out there, against whom my teacher is preparing me to defend myself. This constitutes Caesarosporkism into a position to which I can conceive of becoming converted, which would not be the case if I’d never read a document associating Julius Caesar and sporks.
Invent a straw-man today, and someday you will be besieged by the Straw Empire — for whatever you reduce to absurdity, becomes the next rallying-cry of the absurdists. When you go around reciting “X is wrong, X is wrong!” you are increasing the name-recognition of X. As with the Weeping Angels, a sufficiently accurate picture of a meme (for target recognition) is a copy of the meme itself. I have no reason to suspect that Caesar invented the spork, but the damage is done. Sorry.
<joke>Someday, when humans have invented time travel, one of them is going to go back in time and put a tiny teapot in the asteroid belt in order to make it so that Russell’s Teapot actually did exist.</joke>
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TiDGXt3WrQwtCdDj3/do-we-believe-everything-we-re-told#9GPG2RyQ4HCMaoojd
Yep
If someone spends a great deal of time teaching me that Julius Caesar most definitely did not invent the spork, I’m likely to think they must be arguing against some rival ideology that Caesar did invent the spork. Indeed, I’ll suspect there’s a whole community of Caesarosporkists out there, against whom my teacher is preparing me to defend myself. This constitutes Caesarosporkism into a position to which I can conceive of becoming converted, which would not be the case if I’d never read a document associating Julius Caesar and sporks.
Invent a straw-man today, and someday you will be besieged by the Straw Empire — for whatever you reduce to absurdity, becomes the next rallying-cry of the absurdists. When you go around reciting “X is wrong, X is wrong!” you are increasing the name-recognition of X. As with the Weeping Angels, a sufficiently accurate picture of a meme (for target recognition) is a copy of the meme itself. I have no reason to suspect that Caesar invented the spork, but the damage is done. Sorry.
<joke>Someday, when humans have invented time travel, one of them is going to go back in time and put a tiny teapot in the asteroid belt in order to make it so that Russell’s Teapot actually did exist.</joke>
(joke stolen from Eliezer Yudkowsky)