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Comment by Xirdus | Hacker News Reader

Aggressively dismantling other (and their own!) worldviews is how we've got Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment, among other things.

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There's an enormous chasm between Socrates & Rousseau, and Yudkowsky and co.

I know nothing about Yudkowsky, I think I read like 10 of his words in total over the course of my life. I was commenting on the general principle of aggressively dismantling every worldview all the time. I think it isn't just a good thing to do, it's the only way to arrive at a worldview that actually holds together.

If you meant Yudkowsky and co. are doing the aggressive dismantling wrong, or aren't dismantling their own views aggressively enough - that's fair, I have zero knowledge on the subject and would love to hear more. But if you mean that aggressive dismantling is wrong in and of itself, I think it's totally fair to bring Socrates and Rousseau into the discussion.

Think of it more like: you walk up to someone leaving a church and "socratically dismantle" their worldview by listing their thinking errors. If you actually manage to, you then go and inject your own ideas as to "how it all really works". If they listen to you and now need you for counsel, are they better off?

The socratic dialogues and enlightenment debates are generally taken up by engaged participants (else the dialogues would be quite short eh?) and aim at the idea of revealing truth through questions, or tackling fundamentally interesting ideas.

The dialogues in HPMOR are most often "you're so, so wrong because your mind is defective and clouded by this list of 30 erroneous thinking patterns. Let me elaborate for 10 minutes about why you're a blind fool and I'm a genius who sees the truth".

The pattern is very different and I think characterising what's done in HPMOR, and what's in greek or enlightenment philosophy is a bad idea.

There are good rationalist writers but Yudkowsky is not the one to look at.

Yudkowsky doesn't stand at your place of worship waiting for you to come out. You have to actively reach out, look him up and open his posts to see a single word of what he's saying. At that point, he's the host and you're the guest; if you came to him to read his posts, it's not a fair complaint that you're exposed to his opinions, even if his opinions are critical your own opinions. It's more akin to being a Jehovah's witness, knocking on an atheist's door, asking them to talk about Jesus, and being mad when they say the Gospel was made up. It would be very rude to say at a church, but they're not at a church, they're at his home.

I'm pretty sure Yudkowsky aims at revealing truth through questions and tackling interesting ideas too, at least in his head. Maybe his questions are wrong or his idea of interesting is wrong, and that would be a valid criticism, but it's a completely different argument than that he shouldn't be asking any questions in the first place.

As far as I know, HPMOR is meant to be a parody, not a serious discourse. It's unfair to judge it like a serious discourse. His blog posts, sure, we should judge them by the serious standards, because AFAIK they're absolutely serious.

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