i found it very funny and was quite surprised that was not raised as a reason for liking it before your reply! that was the main thing i liked about it.
FoxLisk
Karma: 13
FoxLisk’s Shortform
I’m a bit late to this but I’m glad to see that you were pointing this stuff out in thread. I see this post as basically containing 2 things:
some useful observations about how the law (and The Law) requires even-handed application to serve its purpose, and how thinking about the law at this abstract level has parallels in other sorts of logical thinking such as the sort mathematicians do a lot of. this stuff feels like the heart of the post and i think it’s mostly correct. i’m unsure how convinced i would be if i didn’t already mostly agree with it, though.
some stuff about how people used to be better in the past, which strikes me as basically the “le wrong generation” meme applied to Being Smart rather than Having Taste. this stuff i think is all basically false and is certainly unsupported in the text.
i think you’re seeing (2) as more central to the post than I am, so I’m less bothered by its inclusion.
But I think you’re correct to point out that it’s unsupported, and i’m in agreement that it’s probably false, and I’m glad you pointed out the irony of giving locally-invalid evidence in a post about how doing that is bad, and it seems to me that Rob spent quite a lot of words totally failing to engage with your actual criticism.
I wish i had more to add: but this comment was so extraordinary that it got me to create an account to mention how extraordinary it was
I’ve been reading some essays from the Rationality: A-Z collection lately, as part of the Lighthaven reading group, and I keep noticing that they do not take advantage of some of LessWrong’s features, such as having footnotes available in-line via mouseover. It would be pretty cool if these important posts were modernized a bit. I don’t know who to ask about this so hopefully the right person magically sees this? 🙏