This is a minor stylistic point, not a substantive critique, but I don’t agree that your choice of wording was clear and obvious. I think it’s widely agreed that defining your terms, using quotes, giving examples, and writing with a baseline assumption that transparency of meaning is an illusion are key to successful communication.
When you don’t do these things, and then use language like “clearly,” “obvious,” “you mistook the meaning of [word],” it’s a little offputting. NBD, just a piece of feedback you can consider, or not.
I have written a fairly lengthy reply about why the approach I took was necessary. I tend to explain things in detail. My posts would be even longer and thus much harder to read and understand if I was any more specific in my explanations. You could expand every paragraph to something this long. People don’t want that level of detail. Here it is.
When you go off on completely unrelated subjects because you misunderstood what a word means in context, am I not supposed to point out that you misunderstood it? Do you not think it is worth pointing out that the entire reply was based on a false premise of what I said? Just about every point in your post was based on a clear misreading of what I wrote, and you needed to read it more carefully.
Words have specific meanings. It is ‘clear’ that ‘final world states’ is ‘what states the world ends up being in as a result’. Writing can be, and often is, ambiguous, but that was not. I could literally write paragraphs to explain each and every term I used, but that would only make things less clear! It would also be a never-ending task.
In this case ‘final’ = ‘resultant’ , so ‘resultant world states’ is clear and just as short, but very awkward. It is important informational content that it was clear, because that determines whether I should try to write that particular point differently in the future, and/or whether you need to interpret things more carefully. While in other contexts final has a relation to time, that is only because of its role in denoting the last thing in a list or sequence (and people often use chronological lists.).
It is similar with the word obvious. I am making a strong, and true, statement as to what the content of the OP’s post is by using the word ‘obvious’. This points out that you should compare that point of my statement to the meaning of the original post, and see that those pieces are the same. This is not a factor of ‘maybe’ this is what was meant or ‘there are multiple interpretations’. Those words are important parts of the message, and removing them would require leaving out large parts of what I was saying.
I do not act like what I write is automatically transparent as to meaning, but as it was, I was very precise and my meaning was clear. There are reasons other than clarity of the writing for whether someone will or won’t understand, but I can’t control those parts.
People don’t have to like that I was sending these messages, of course. That ‘of course’ is an important part of what I’m saying too. In this case, that I am acknowledging a generally known fact that people can and will dislike the messages I send, at least sometimes.
Around these parts, some people like to talk about levels of epistemic belief. The words ‘clear’ and ‘obvious’ clearly and obviously convey that my level of epistemic certainty here is very high. It is ‘epistemic certainty’ here because of just how high it is. It does not denote complete certainty like I have for 2 + 2 = 4, but more like my certainty that I am not currently conversing with an AI.
If I was trying to persuade rather than inform, I would not send these messages, and I would not say these words. Then I would pay more attention to guessing what tone people would read into the fact I was saying a certain message rather than the content of the message itself, and I might avoid phrases like ‘clear’, ‘obvious’, and so on. Their clarity would be a point against them.
I did include an example. It was one of the five paragraphs, no shorter than the others. That whole thing about someone caring about orphans, wanting them taken care of, being against taking taxes from people to do it, and founding them with their own money? There is no interpretation of things where it isn’t an example of both paths and states mattering, and about how altruism is clearly compatible with that.
Your part about using quotes is genuinely ambiguous. Are you trying to claim I should have quoted random famous people about my argument, which is wholly unnecessary, or that you wish for me to scour the internet for quotes by Utilitarians proving they think this way, which is an impossibly large endeavor for this sort of post rather than a research paper (when even that wouldn’t necessarily be telling)? Or quote the OP, even though I was responding to the whole thing?
This is a minor stylistic point, not a substantive critique, but I don’t agree that your choice of wording was clear and obvious. I think it’s widely agreed that defining your terms, using quotes, giving examples, and writing with a baseline assumption that transparency of meaning is an illusion are key to successful communication.
When you don’t do these things, and then use language like “clearly,” “obvious,” “you mistook the meaning of [word],” it’s a little offputting. NBD, just a piece of feedback you can consider, or not.
I have written a fairly lengthy reply about why the approach I took was necessary. I tend to explain things in detail. My posts would be even longer and thus much harder to read and understand if I was any more specific in my explanations. You could expand every paragraph to something this long. People don’t want that level of detail. Here it is.
When you go off on completely unrelated subjects because you misunderstood what a word means in context, am I not supposed to point out that you misunderstood it? Do you not think it is worth pointing out that the entire reply was based on a false premise of what I said? Just about every point in your post was based on a clear misreading of what I wrote, and you needed to read it more carefully.
Words have specific meanings. It is ‘clear’ that ‘final world states’ is ‘what states the world ends up being in as a result’. Writing can be, and often is, ambiguous, but that was not. I could literally write paragraphs to explain each and every term I used, but that would only make things less clear! It would also be a never-ending task.
In this case ‘final’ = ‘resultant’ , so ‘resultant world states’ is clear and just as short, but very awkward. It is important informational content that it was clear, because that determines whether I should try to write that particular point differently in the future, and/or whether you need to interpret things more carefully. While in other contexts final has a relation to time, that is only because of its role in denoting the last thing in a list or sequence (and people often use chronological lists.).
It is similar with the word obvious. I am making a strong, and true, statement as to what the content of the OP’s post is by using the word ‘obvious’. This points out that you should compare that point of my statement to the meaning of the original post, and see that those pieces are the same. This is not a factor of ‘maybe’ this is what was meant or ‘there are multiple interpretations’. Those words are important parts of the message, and removing them would require leaving out large parts of what I was saying.
I do not act like what I write is automatically transparent as to meaning, but as it was, I was very precise and my meaning was clear. There are reasons other than clarity of the writing for whether someone will or won’t understand, but I can’t control those parts.
People don’t have to like that I was sending these messages, of course. That ‘of course’ is an important part of what I’m saying too. In this case, that I am acknowledging a generally known fact that people can and will dislike the messages I send, at least sometimes.
Around these parts, some people like to talk about levels of epistemic belief. The words ‘clear’ and ‘obvious’ clearly and obviously convey that my level of epistemic certainty here is very high. It is ‘epistemic certainty’ here because of just how high it is. It does not denote complete certainty like I have for 2 + 2 = 4, but more like my certainty that I am not currently conversing with an AI.
If I was trying to persuade rather than inform, I would not send these messages, and I would not say these words. Then I would pay more attention to guessing what tone people would read into the fact I was saying a certain message rather than the content of the message itself, and I might avoid phrases like ‘clear’, ‘obvious’, and so on. Their clarity would be a point against them.
I did include an example. It was one of the five paragraphs, no shorter than the others. That whole thing about someone caring about orphans, wanting them taken care of, being against taking taxes from people to do it, and founding them with their own money? There is no interpretation of things where it isn’t an example of both paths and states mattering, and about how altruism is clearly compatible with that.
Your part about using quotes is genuinely ambiguous. Are you trying to claim I should have quoted random famous people about my argument, which is wholly unnecessary, or that you wish for me to scour the internet for quotes by Utilitarians proving they think this way, which is an impossibly large endeavor for this sort of post rather than a research paper (when even that wouldn’t necessarily be telling)? Or quote the OP, even though I was responding to the whole thing?