Luke
Article
Luke is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 29, 2021 and September 03, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The blogger, a man in his mid-twenties named Luke, chimed in to say that he had considered his critics’ arguments carefully”; “Hey, thanks - I feel the same way about your writing,” Luke replied”; “Luke. Nice to meet you”. It most often appears alongside Barack Obama, California, 1980s.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: September 29, 2021
- Last seen: September 03, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Barack Obama (2 shared issues)
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- 1980s (1 shared issues)
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- Air Force One (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- anal probing (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Jackson (1 shared issues)
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- Anglophone countries (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
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- Bayes’ Rule (1 shared issues)
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- BDSM (1 shared issues)
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- being-a-good-person training (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
One week in 2010, I was following a heated debate online over whether a particular blog post was sexist. The blogger, a man in his mid-twenties named Luke, chimed in to say that he had considered his critics’ arguments carefully but didn’t think that there was anything wrong with his post. Still, he said, he was open to changing his mind. He even published a list titled “Why It’s Plausible I’m Wrong”, in which he summarized and linked to some of the best arguments against him so far, while explaining why he wasn’t persuaded by them.
A few days later, by which point the debate spanned over 1,500 comments across multiple blogs - Luke posted again. He wanted to let everyone know that he had found an argument that had convinced him that his original post was harmful.
He had surely already alienated many readers who believed his original post to be morally wrong, Luke acknowledged. “And now, by disagreeing with those who came to my defense and said there was nothing wrong with my post, I’ll probably alienate even more readers,” he said. “Well, that’s too bad, because I do think it was morally wrong.”
“Maybe not directly, but think about it. People always say that it could happen here. That early 20th century Europeans thought they were so great and civilized, but the Holocaust proves that even the seemingly-most-sophisticated countries can descend into barbarism and genocide at any time. But they can’t! Or there’s only a one in a billion chance that they do, the same as everyone thought in 1900. It’s just that everyone who’s still alive comes from world-branches where the one-in-a-billion thing happened. I even think World War I was a fluke - that was the only way the outcome pump could set up Hitler.”
“Luke. Nice to meet you. I see you’re interested in a position in our ‘Secretly Funding All Media That You Personally Dislike’ division. Give me just a second to view your resume…wow! The last season of Game Of Thrones! That’s quite the accomplishment! We just need to ask you one question - what’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”
Luke spoke in a whisper. “I think Joe Biden is still President.”