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1) i am not a sockpuppet
2) accusations of sockpuppetry are boring meta, in general
3) maintaining a disagreement through many iterations of discussion is not remotely the same as a conscious strategy of arguing until exhaustion and then declaring victory. perspectives vary widely and communication is hard. discussions need to be approached with these facts in mind and not burdened by unrealistic expectations of quick results.
4) i posted this to LW because I thought discussion of a robust process to combat intellectual bias would be of PARTICULAR interest to LW people, and not as part of an elaborate strategy of wanting to appear intellectually/morally superior.
I'm not offended or anything btw. i merely wanted to confront these claims head on.
the issue isn’t: does X person owe Y person an answer. it’s: issue X must be answered, by someone, as part of humanity making intellectual progress
people who do not participate in this are not progress-making intellectuals. of course, if they are instead answering issues Y and Z, that’s good. but sufficiently bad prioritization (e.g. ignoring a bunch of hard issues while addressing easy ones) will waste one’s career.
and what should one do about this? well, try to have some process so your prioritization isn’t biased.
Is there an alternative solution to the same problems this essay is concerned with, written down somewhere, which you think is successful? If not – if you regard this issue as a major, unsolved problem – why respond to this attempted solution with such initial bias and hostility, instead of making a more serious attempt to figure out how it could work (you looked only for negative things to say, not for positives, and not solutions to the negatives you thought of)? Alternatively, if you regard the whole issue as a non-problem requiring no solution at all, you haven’t explained that.