(Responding to old post here.)

I think this is typical-minding. For a child who isn't a weird geek of the type who will grow up to post on LW, the adult knows more than the child and is a lot closer to correct than the child is about most of your points (maybe not the third one, although I don't think that quite describes what's going on). When a non-geek child disagrees with the teacher about whether the math skills are useful later in life or whether they are for the child's own good, my bet would be on the teacher. The child probably doesn't care much about either of those things and certainly didn't conclude that math is useless based on good reasoning, and the teacher is probably a lot more knowledgeable than the child on pretty much any subject. And a non-geek child who's disruptive or inattentive probably is at fault; he's supposed to be learning the math whether it's interesting or not and non-geeks really do need to be learning at this point.

If the child is an A+ student who understands the math after a week and finds it useless to go through of months of lessons teaching the same thing repeatedly, sure, the teacher is wrong. Maybe you were one of those. Most kids are not.

Is your point here that you didn’t literally switch to arguing in favor of the proposition Y, but rather switched to asking what led to Y being the case? This is a nitpick—a distinction without a difference

Here you seem to be saying that someone might not be literally arguing for something, but he might in effect be doing so anyway.

Yet your original post seems to reject that concept. Here you claim that Zack is wrong because he did not take someone's words literally, and instead did interpret those words to be in effect saying something:

“But if I take your specific word choice and imagine a whole epistemological stance that produced that word choice, I disagree with that epistemological stance because of such-and-such.”

Go and call the plumber (or ideally, ask the person on our staff who already knows). Then ask the plumber to explain to you what they are going to do to fix the problem. Then fix the problem yourself.

1. If you don't have a person on your staff who already knows, and if the plumber isn't on call, I hope you are paying the plumber for calling him and asking him to explain, while knowing in advance that your plans won't include hiring him.

2. Who's going to do the event invoices when you're fixing the plumbing yourself? You have comparative advantage over the plumber; it doesn't matter that fixing the plumbing yourself instead of having the plumber do it benefits you, because doing the event invoices benefits you more.

3. It seems like this would fall under "Knowing how to perform a task yourself at all is not the same as knowing how to perform it as well as the person you are delegating the task to." Doing the plumbing yourself requires more skill (and probably equipment) than is necessary to understand the plumbing.

People will pay the same amount to save 200,000 birds as 2,000.

People don't want to save X number of birds as a terminal goal. They want to save a significant number of birds at a reasonable cost. And the fact that the question asks you about saving X number of birds would, in most contexts outside a poll specifically designed to not do so, provide information about what number is significant and what number can be saved at a reasonable cost. Since people being asked the question with 2000 and people who are asked the question with 200000 are provided what would normally be different information, different answers are expected.

Also, the phrase "anthropic principle" appears nowhere in this post. Having nothing important until humans came around is completely expected; being able to make a graph and being important are strongly correlated, and by the anthropic principle, the time when the graph is made is always centered around now.

"You said it's mutually exclusive here and you said the opposite there" is adversarial in the sense that pointing out any sort of error or inconsistency is adversarial. In other words, it is literally adversarial, but it's a good kind of adversarial. You can't point out an inconsistency without being adversarial!

Why can’t there be a rock-paper-scissors–like structure, where in some position, 12. …Ne4 is good against positional players and bad against tactical players?

I would say that in that situation, the move is bad, but being a positional player after your opponent makes that move is also bad.

A human computer programmer would read your code after you submit it and decide whether your program chooses 1-boxing or 2-boxing.

The human computer programmer is not immune to the halting problem, so he can't always do this.

EA strives for maximization of MEASURABLE and SPECIFIED value(s), but the value dimensions need not be (I’d argue CAN not be) objectively chosen.

That implies that if I want to make things better for Americans specifically, that would be EA.

Your answer highly depends on what the rule says you could be swapped with (and what it even means to be swapped with something of different intelligence, personality, or circumstances--are you still you?) Saying "every human on Earth" isn't getting rid of a nitpick; it's forcing an answer.