The importance of Not Getting the Joke

I think that of all the LessWrong articles I've read, this one has to be the worst presented. It reads like a 14-year-old's AIM profile. Why, why would you ever link to the Icelandic Google Image Search for the word "no"?

I did my best to try to read past the presentation to see if you were actually making a point somewhere. I couldn't find it. Try again.

Bryan Caplan makes a similar argument in The Myth of the Rational Voter -- in a nutshell, the probability that a vote will actually have much of an effect in an election is negligible, and therefore also the individual voter's costs of choosing poorly. On the other hand, the benefit of voting in a way that feels right -- matching self or group image, for example -- may be notable. Likewise most political argument?

ha ha.

(1) seems pretty common, and from what I know of Mr Sailer, I imagine it underlies most of his examples- there'll be an article highlighting some inequality or problem and the "facts which undermine the premises of the piece" are the suggested causes, the "joke" is that the author's see the outcome as undesirable while Sailer sees attempts to change the outcome as foolish.

Conspicuous wrongness sounds close to belief as attire (the article with the pagan lady who believed something she obviously didn't think was true) but with the addition that someone believes it's true, so the motive is not to disagree with them. I think ideologues often identify each other by the viewpoints they can be certain nobody else shares- how else to explain why the unreadable Atlas Shrugs remains more popular than Rand's other books, which are no less strident but considerably more appealing to outsiders.

I have a problem with the editing here:

When I type two words like so in the submit article section, it comes out like it should. But when I save the thing or post it, it comes out likeso.

This happens with links, bolded and italic text. In order for it to be readable I need to use double spacing, which just looks odd. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong here? I'd really appreciate the help.

You have neglected the possibility that the stuff Mr Sailer thinks is obviously wrong isnt obiously wrong.

Taboo wrongness please.

What exactly are you proposing is going on in the mind of someone participating in this? Plain cognitive dissonance? My intuitive answer would be that what you are talking about is more or less covered by compartmentalization encouraged by incentives. Or perhaps Not Getting The Joke is basically just a game when enemy attire is convenient but not fashionable.