I was hoping that this post would be something of a Defense against the Dark Arts post, but it doesn't seem to be:

[Dawkins saying "I do not intend to disparage trans people…"]

This doesn’t work. People see through it. It comes across as either dishonest or oblivious, and both make you look bad. If you want to genuinely engage in mistake theory discourse, do it in spaces where that’s actually the norm—academic seminars, private discussions, carefully-gated intellectual communities. Don’t perform neutrality in conflict arenas while making moves that clearly serve specific interests.

Suppose he actually wants to take the other side down a peg.

It seems to me that the only people who object to him playing power games are postmodernists, who think, by and large, that all communication is power games.

What is there to lose by playing power games with people who think that roughly all communication is power games?

Strong-downvoted for being indistinguishable from unedited ChatGPT output.

(That apparently Claude wrote it doesn't matter.)

cybernetic models

What do you (all) mean by "cybernetic" here?

people who OOP

I'm assuming you're not talking about object-oriented programming, but I can't figure out what this acronym refers to.

I think a bunch of these kinds of things are plots for Seinfeld episodes.

That is an incredibly useful definition for a term I’ve seen floating around here for years — thanks!

…could it be put somewhere moderately prominent, where people can stumble over it?

I’m kind of hoping it could be somewhere prominent in the first page of results on https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=hufflepuff. I’m looking at https://www.lesswrong.com/sequences/oyZGWX9WkgWzEDt6M and while your comment’s definition makes the page make sense, I wouldn’t be able to independently generate your comment’s definition from “comradery, reliability, trustworthiness, willingness to do physical work, willingness to stick with things for a long time, etc.”.

Is “Hufflepuff” (as a personality type) described anywhere concisely and more or less completely on LW? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DbdP8hD2AcKcdSsgF/project-hufflepuff-planting-the-flag seems like the closest thing to an explainer, but it seems incomplete. (https://www.greaterwrong.com/w/heroic-responsibility is exactly the sort of explainer that I’d want for Hufflepuff.)

And so, this post seems like a very bad example for some kinds of mind, because heroic responsibility is when you say “it doesn’t matter what role I have”, and so people who are blocked on imagining themselves as a business owner/leader would be put off by this instead of getting it.

Yeah, it’s not particularly heroic if you’re The Guy, even if it means you’re the one putting in 70-hour weeks fixing stuff that crops up to keep the business running because if you don’t fix it, nobody will, and the business will collapse.

Meanwhile, https://www.greaterwrong.com/w/heroic-responsibility — that I got to by clicking on the tag above the post that reads “Heroic Responsibility” — seems significantly clearer about the heroism aspect, and I don’t think having read HPMOR ages ago means it’s all that extra understandable compared to Joe Q. Public.

You’re not contradicting my point.

Pausing and thinking “should I just implement bubble sort, or should I go look up something that’s better for my use case and implement that instead” is work, and it’s not free.

Now, it might not be extra work the fourth time around (when you can knowingly choose and bang out block sort in your sleep just as easily as you can bubble sort…or say the thing in a way that doesn’t ruffle feathers at the dinner party), but it’s work initially, and isn’t free.

Often it seems to me like there’s free grace for the same amount of honesty.

It’s not free.

One has to think, often in advance of the dinner party or whatever, how to phrase something differently to get more grace for the same amount of honesty.