An argument in favor of it is, "free association" is inherently a fuzzy human thing, where the process is just thinking for a bit and seeing what you come up with and at some point declaring victory; there is nothing in it that could possibly guarantee correctness.  Arguably, anyone who encounters the term should be conscious of this, and therefore notice that it's an inappropriate step in a logical argument that purports to establish high certainty.  Perhaps even notice that the term itself is paradoxical: in a logical context, "exhaustion" must be a rigorous process, but "free association" is inherently unrigorous.

I'm not sure if I buy the argument.  The author of "The Design of Everyday Things" warns against being too clever with names and assuming that normal people will get the reference you intend.  But... I dunno.

Interesting.

Hmmph.  If he wants to push people to do more research so that they can make statements without any such qualifiers—or to shut up when they haven't done enough research to have anything useful to say—then I may sympathize.  If he wants them to make themselves sound more certain than they are, then I oppose.

Rescue the girl and plan to explain to the wealthy people what happened.  Possibly try to bring her with him, for purposes including lending credence to his story.

Indeed.  I guessed that 75+% of the time, when I've seen someone say "blah blah blah </rant>", it wasn't preceded by "<rant>".

The use of the HTML end tag implies that this disclaimer would appear after the text it describes.  But it seems like it would be best put before the text?  (Perhaps this is just another thing that "ideally would be this, but in practice will often be that"?)  If the text is a series of chat messages, then, yeah, you may not realize a disclaimer should apply until after you've sent the things to which it should apply.  But if it's one big post, then it's always easy to move it to the top of the post.

After a couple of minutes of poking around, I can't figure out how to fix it in the interface the page editor gives me, but: The three images on this page in the agree/disagree/Moloch list use a url beginning with localhost:3000, instead of lesswrong.com or a "//" relative address (which seems most ideal), and thus don't load for those not running an instance of lesswrong at localhost:3000.

IMO, like almost every social, psychological, and cultural trait, it exists on a continuum.

For natural predispositions, I'm sure that's true; but to the extent that the trait is a result of learning / training / experience / habit, it's quite possible for there to be effects that push it towards one extreme or another, resulting in a bimodal distribution.

A category that comes to mind is, if there's a behavior that people have some normally-distributed natural inclination towards, but is suppressed in most of society, and if there's a place where that behavior is relatively unsuppressed, then (to the extent that the behavior is important to them) the people with a strong inclination to do it will move to that location, and that place will probably end up tolerating or even supporting it more, and this positive feedback loop can iterate.  If the result is stable, then it might form what you could call a culture.

Seems like that depends on details of the problem. If the receptor has zero function, then yes. If functionality is significantly reduced but nonzero… maybe.