“Comment on ‘Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation’” by Zack_M_Davis

One of the most underrated essays in the post-Sequences era of Eliezer Yudkowsky's corpus is "Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation". The degree to which this piece of wisdom has fallen into tragic neglect in these dark ages of the 2020s may be related to its ephemeral form of publication: it was originally posted as a status update on Yudkowsky's Facebook account on 20 December 2016 and subsequently mirrored on Alyssa Vance's The Rationalist Conspiracy blog, which has since gone offline. (The first link in this paragraph is to an archive of the Rationalist Conspiracy post.)

In the post, Yudkowsky argues that a structure of intellectual value necessarily requires four layers of conversation: thesis, critique, response, and counter-response (which Yudkowsky indexes from zero as layers 0, 1, 2, and 3).

The importance of critique is already widespread common wisdom: if a thesis is advanced and promulgated without any [...]

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First published:
July 17th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yr4pSJweTnF6QDHHC/comment-on-four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.