Quoth Yud:
I'm sort of skeptical that you could write something that works as science communication for a general audience, though lord knows I'm not necessarily succeeding either.
All the faux modesty of Tommy Tallarico saying "my mother is very proud".
The key valid ideas to be communicated are [made-up sci-fi bullshit about nanobots]
If I were inclined to be charitable, I'd wonder who he was talking to that honestly thought in terms of "elan vital" and "game balance". Like, take the question "Why is flesh soft and diamond hard?", and ask somebody without a science background. I'd guess that the typical response would go something like, "I'unno, it just is." Or, "I've never thought about it, why?" Or, "Heh heh heh, you said hard". I suspect that Yud is making up a layperson of his own invention, a mythical audience upon whom his Educate spell is perfectly effective. He refuses to admit any challenge to his mental model of how the process of explanation works.
Yudkowsky:
Talking to the general public is hard.
Multiple commenters on FanFiction.net replying to chapter 23 of HPMOR: Genetics don't work that way. If magic were recessive, then wizard parents would always have wizard kids and there would be no such thing as squibs. Look, I drew the Punnett square....
"If you take only the statements where I was vague instead of the ones where I was explicitly wrong and interpret my words in the way that I am now telling you to, you will see that I am right."
That hat could only work with New Year's Eve glasses from a year with "00".
In an essay that somehow manages to offhandendly mention both evolutionary psychology and hentai anime in the same paragraph.
Is one truly fulfilling the fantasy if one's lair is not in a volcano?
A fart-huff that hard qualifies as an Alvistime miracle.
my "not a cult" T-shirt has raised many questions, etc.
"Welcome to our Burning Man camp, Bugs Crawling Under Your Skin"
Quoth Yud:
Ribosomes ... make proteins.