I mean… what you're actually criticizing is that Alan Watts is a goo philosopher.

He's not trying to be precise or carefully define what he's talking about. He's instead using loose metaphors to convey a feeling.

And your objection is that his loose metaphors are pointing at things that have precise definitions and therefore he's technically mistaken in how he's trying to illustrate his point.

To which a goo person would shrug. Because they understood the message, and that's the real point. Not technical accuracy of the words & metaphors.

So in a funny way, you're actually illustrating Watts' point.

Agree with this. 

I think there's an occasionally occurring thing where people will post "gooey stuff" on LW and it's rejected not because it's gooey but because it's overconfidently and/or sloppily argued. Then in some cases, rather than responding to the criticisms, the authors will attribute the negative reaction to the gooiness of the post rather than to the fact that people had reasonable criticisms the authors weren't willing to address. In turn, LW readers will see that the people making the gooey posts are unable to take criticism, and make the inference that all of the gooey stuff just melts people's brains and makes them unable to reason rationally... making them more likely to actually be prejudiced towards more gooey stuff in the future.

But this only happens because there's a perceived dichotomy between gooey and prickly stuff in the first place. If the people posting the gooey stuff wouldn't make a big deal out of how their gooey stuff is more sophisticated than the simple-minded prickly readers are capable of comprehending, the bias against gooey stuff wouldn't get formed in the first place. Rather the bad articles would be seen just as bad articles, rather than tainting all the gooey stuff by association.

I fear that this post is further playing into the same dynamic. Its tone reads to me as slightly strawmanny and condescending, further reinforcing the frame of, depending on who you ask, "the gooey people who get it vs. the unenlightened prickly people who need to be taught that non-prickly things can be useful too" and "the gooey people who think of themselves better as prickly people when they're actually just more sloppy thinkers vs. the prickly people who haven't melted their brains and can still reason sensibly".

Thanks for the input!

It wasn't my intention to reinforce this dichotomy. Instead, I hoped to encourage people to name things that break the rationalist community's Overton window, so that others read them and think "Whoopsie, things like that can actually be said here?!" I suspect that way more people here picked up useful heuristics and models in their pre-rationalist days than realize it, because they overupdate on the way of the Sequences being the One True Way. I've learned in other communities that breaking taboos with questions like these is a useful means for breaking conformity pressure. My hope was that eventually, this helps a little to reduce the imbalance towards prickliness I perceive in the rationalist community, and with that this dichotomy. 

Apparently, I haven't yet figured out how to express and enact intentions like these in a way that fits the rationalist language game.