This was an extremely enjoyable read.

Good fun.

My comment may be considered low effort, but this is a fascinating article. Thank you for posting it.

While I find the Socrates analogy vivid and effective, I propose considering critics on posts under the same bucket as lawyers. Where Socrates had a certain set of so-called principles-- choosing to die for arbitrary reasons, I find that most people are not half as dogmatic as Socrates, and so the analogy/metaphor seems to slip short.

While my post is sitting at negative two, and no comments or feedback... Modeling commenters as if they were lawyers might be better? When the rules lawyers have to follow shows up, lawyers (usually) do change their behavior, though they naturally poke and prod as far as they can within the bounds of the social game that is the court system.

But also, everyone who is sane hates lawyers.

Part of the problem with verifying this is that the number of machine learning people who got into machine learning due to lesswrong. We need more machine learning people whom were able to come to doom conclusions of their own accord, independent of hpmor etc, as a control group.

As far as I can tell, the number worried about doom overlap 1:1 with lesswrong posters/readers, and if it was such a threat, we'd expect there to be some number of people coming to the conclusions independently/of their own accord.

This post was inspired by parasitic language games.

That framing makes sense to me.

Is knowing someone's being an asshole an aspect of hyperstition?

I met an ex-Oracle sales guy-turned medium-bigwig at other companies once. 

He justified it by calling it "selling ahead", and it started because the reality is that if you tell customers no, you don't get the deal. They told the customers they would have requested features. The devs would later get notice when the deal was signed, and no one on management ever complained, and everyone else on his "team" was doing it.

How do we measure intent? 

Unless you mean to say a person who actively and verbally attempts to shun the truth?

Any preferred critiques of Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreements?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham's_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement-en.svg

Extra layers or reorderings?