That seems like a failure of noticing confusion; some clear things are actually false.
This post is a good example of why LW is dying. Specifically, that it was posted as a comment to a garbage-collector thread in the second-class area. Something is horribly wrong with the selection mechanism for what gets on the front page.
[citation needed]
You favor lying to people to scam money out of them because it would be inconvenient for your education plans to not be able to scam money out of them? That seems unethical.
Does that actually work better than just setting a higher bar for significance? My gut says that data is data and chopping it up cleverly can't work magic.
If I have no value as a human, I desire to believe I have no value as a human.
Are you planning to do any analysis on what traits are associated with defection? That could get ugly fast.
(I took the survey)
Probably the only two things the True Patronus can look like are humans and snakes. Possibly flying squirrels?
There's room for improvement, but this is just a rant. It's useless for the project of improvement, because he's attacking anything he can find a clever turn of phrase for, rather than the things that especially deserve attack.
It's not even useful to see where the PR failure is, because once something set him off, everything suddenly became a PR failure. Look for insight in saner places than this, please.
A robot is going on a one-shot mission to a distant world to collect important data needed to research a cure for a plague that is devastating the Earth. When the robot enters hyperspace, it notices some anomalies in the engine's output, but it is too late to get the engine fixed. The anomalies are of a sort that, when similar anomalies have been observed in other engines, 25% of the time it indicates a fatal problem, such that the engine will explode virtually every time it tries to jump. 25% of the time, it has been a false positive, and the engine exploded only at its normal negligible rate. 50% of... (read 182 more words →)
Yeah, I feel like in real world situations, hypothesizing time travel when things don't make sense is not likely to be epistemically successful.
Wasn't there a proverb about generalizing from fictional evidence? Especially from fiction that intentionally doesn't make sense?