Exactly. The original post is straightforwardly wrong, and doesn’t even do its readers the courtesy of including a one-line summary that lets them avoid having to read the whole thing. The fact that it’s at +40 is a damning indictment of LessWrong’s ability to tell good arguments from bad.
The only serious mistake I see in the original post is that it misinterprets Parfit. I agree with Unnamed that it does. But LessWrongers haven’t necessarily read Parfit, and they may have seen his ideas misused to argue in the way the post criticizes, so they can’t really be expected to detect the misinterpretation.
Exactly. The original post is straightforwardly wrong, and doesn’t even do its readers the courtesy of including a one-line summary that lets them avoid having to read the whole thing. The fact that it’s at +40 is a damning indictment of LessWrong’s ability to tell good arguments from bad.
The only serious mistake I see in the original post is that it misinterprets Parfit. I agree with Unnamed that it does. But LessWrongers haven’t necessarily read Parfit, and they may have seen his ideas misused to argue in the way the post criticizes, so they can’t really be expected to detect the misinterpretation.