Less Wrong is a Center of Pestilence, as Uncle Al Crowley would say.

And, really, E. Yudkowsky does little else except tell awful, inept stories.

I refuse to inflict the video on myself, but I assume that Cowan is giving vent to the anti-humanistic and nekulturny impulses common among the nerdletariat, these days.

It was posted on LessWrong not long after it found its way to YouTube. I missed it there too, so thanks for reposting this. I made some lengthy circuitous remarks on this in my own LJ, more for my own benefit because my thoughts are incomplete. My main point is I think we can become more skeptical of stories by becoming more adept storytellers ourselves, recognizing that there are other stories. In doing this it might also become more acclaimed to dissonant stories that still carry important ideas—Robin Hanson's work, for instance.

Glad to see people taking the important part of postmodernism to heart, without swalling some of the more dubious directions it has gone in.

I think this whole topic is extremely important. And if I'd have had the opportunity to give a lecture at TED I probably would have chosen the same topic. But there's something sad about the fact that someone has to give this lecture to an audience of technologically literate adults. I feel like this kind of thing should be taught in grade school, maybe even in elementary school. We spend enough time telling kids stories, why not throw in some warnings about the dangers of taking stories too seriously? It seems wreckless the way we currently educate.

I think the takehome message though should be that you should always be more suspicious of simple stories than complex ones. I don't think he was quite clear enough on one issue: there may only be a few *basic* stories, but there is no limit to how many stories you can tell. I don't think story-telling can be avoided, but the real danger is stories that oversimplify. Hence, avoiding the few basic ones that get repeated a lot is what's important.