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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. A brilliant insight into how people don't actually work. I read the first third hoping for an example, then the rest just hoping that anything would happen. My opinion of slatestarcodex was significantly higher an hour ago than it is now.

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Well, it's memetic warfare fiction, but I don't feel it's that far off the mark. The other day I've been in a discussion where some of the people disagreeing with me were - in my eyes - failing at reading comprehension, seemingly unable to parse the simple English statements of the source material that somehow became quoted by both sides of the argument. I left that discussion with worrying feeling that those others, most of them smart techies, couldn't possibly be that dumb, so there must be something else going on. I find this story uncanny because within its universe, it hints at what that "something else" is.

(Oh, and my opinion of SSC went up a bit.)

Having been in many arguments that seem like that[0], I think the answer is actually quite simple: sometimes it's just hard to communicate with other human beings. Communication can only convey understanding with shared context, and sometimes our contexts line up enough to make it seem like we're conveying understanding but each of us is consistently misunderstanding the other. Between the frustration and our tendency towards viewing attacks against our arguments as attacks against our being, you sometimes wind up with the kind of behavior discussed in this story.

The story itself is effective because it constructs a malevolent purpose to explain everyday phenomena we don't normally think too much about. John Dies at the End used Baader-Meinhof to similar effect.

[0]If I'm honest with myself about it, arguing is one of my favorite pastimes.

I think a lot of divides are because people have different assumed axioms, and in many cases cannot even declare what those axioms are.

Example:

I know pro-life people who cannot understand how someone could simultaneously hold the belief that aborting fetuses with congenital defects is okay, but rounding up the severely handicapped and killing them is not; there is nothing magical about birth that changes a life from not being valuable to being valuable.

Simultaneously I know pro-choice people who cannot understand how someone could simultaneously vouch for reducing or eliminating social welfare services to single mothers but also vouch for making abortions illegal; clearly the pro-life people don't care about babies after they are born!

Since the other side holds inconsistent views, they are wrongheaded hypocrites and all of their arguments can be dismissed without further thought. No compromise is possible because to compromise with hypocrites is to enable their hypocrisy.

Funny how this story is itself a scissor. I loved it and thought that, although exaggerated, it did a really good job of being a piece of hard science fiction. Relatively plausible but somewhat future technology (better RNN implementations that have been forthcoming in response to the story) and its somewhat exaggerated implications to show off the danger to society of that general direction of technology.

> Funny how this story is itself a scissor.

Heh, this analogy. It's so tempting to make but nah I don't think it's even 1% as contentious. I just think it's too drawn out even though the idea is cute, I'm not going to fight over it.

"A brilliant insight into how people don't actually work" describes almost everything Scott Alexander writes outside of psychopharmacology, and really should also be the epigraph for Less Wrong-style rationalism as a whole.

Well, that's the point, isn't it? LessWrong, SlateStarCodex, The Last Psychiatrist- all blogs that say "here's how people work; it's bad; here's how we think they should work instead".

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