Promoted to curated: I think this post feels like it’s in some important respects failing at the kind of standard that I normally hold LessWrong posts to. My guess is this is partially the result of the territory and partially something that I think can just be done better and this post didn’t succeed at. More concretely, I feel like this post keeps trying to poetically point at a concept, by using it and making statements about it, without really acknowledging the degree to which the post fails to give a clear and mechanistic definition of what it is talking about.
This makes it likely that readers walk away think with an inflated sense of understanding, and I think also gives rise to a bunch of “conflationary alliances” where people build a shared identity around a definition of “wholesomeness” that is framed in a way that avoid falsification (since falsification would threaten the alliance).
Despite that, I have found the concept handle of “wholesomeness” quite useful and have used it a bunch, though I’ve so far only felt comfortable using it with a bunch of disclaimers about the concept feeling kind of trap-like. Ben’s restated definition of the concept gets the closest to how I use it internally:
When I am choosing an action and justifying it as wholesome, what it often feels like is that I am trying to track all the obvious considerations, but some (be it internal or external) force is pushing me to ignore one of them. Not merely to trade off against it, but to look away from it in my mind.
I associate “unwholesemeness” with a specific mental motion where in order to either get some kind of social buy in, or to stop feeling overwhelmed with a decision, or want to avoid blameability for the consequence of a decision of mine by not thinking about it (ala Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics), where I rewrite my map to not include some part of reality, or assert that that part of reality is “unimportant” so that the resulting decision is “obvious”. And “wholesomeness” with a kind of courage of instead confronting and owning the difficulty of getting buy-in, or the ambiguity of the decision. I like having a pointer to it, which I didn’t have before this post, though I already had a concept for this, so I might be projecting what this post is about too much into my preconceptions.
This overall does make me want to curate this, though I do think a rewrite that tackles this concept from a more reductionistic angle (of course recognizing the limits of such an approach), or just another post, is something that seems likely worth it to me.
FWIW I quite like your way of pointing at things here, though maybe I’m more inclined towards letting things hang out for a while in the (conflationary?) alliance space to see which seem to be the deepest angles of what’s going on in this vicinity, and doing more of the conceptual analysis a little later.
That said, if someone wanted to suggest a rewrite I’d seriously consider adopting it (or using it as a jumping-off point); I just don’t think that I’m yet at the place where a rewrite will flow naturally for me.
Promoted to curated: I think this post feels like it’s in some important respects failing at the kind of standard that I normally hold LessWrong posts to. My guess is this is partially the result of the territory and partially something that I think can just be done better and this post didn’t succeed at. More concretely, I feel like this post keeps trying to poetically point at a concept, by using it and making statements about it, without really acknowledging the degree to which the post fails to give a clear and mechanistic definition of what it is talking about.
This makes it likely that readers walk away think with an inflated sense of understanding, and I think also gives rise to a bunch of “conflationary alliances” where people build a shared identity around a definition of “wholesomeness” that is framed in a way that avoid falsification (since falsification would threaten the alliance).
Despite that, I have found the concept handle of “wholesomeness” quite useful and have used it a bunch, though I’ve so far only felt comfortable using it with a bunch of disclaimers about the concept feeling kind of trap-like. Ben’s restated definition of the concept gets the closest to how I use it internally:
I associate “unwholesemeness” with a specific mental motion where in order to either get some kind of social buy in, or to stop feeling overwhelmed with a decision, or want to avoid blameability for the consequence of a decision of mine by not thinking about it (ala Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics), where I rewrite my map to not include some part of reality, or assert that that part of reality is “unimportant” so that the resulting decision is “obvious”. And “wholesomeness” with a kind of courage of instead confronting and owning the difficulty of getting buy-in, or the ambiguity of the decision. I like having a pointer to it, which I didn’t have before this post, though I already had a concept for this, so I might be projecting what this post is about too much into my preconceptions.
This overall does make me want to curate this, though I do think a rewrite that tackles this concept from a more reductionistic angle (of course recognizing the limits of such an approach), or just another post, is something that seems likely worth it to me.
FWIW I quite like your way of pointing at things here, though maybe I’m more inclined towards letting things hang out for a while in the (conflationary?) alliance space to see which seem to be the deepest angles of what’s going on in this vicinity, and doing more of the conceptual analysis a little later.
That said, if someone wanted to suggest a rewrite I’d seriously consider adopting it (or using it as a jumping-off point); I just don’t think that I’m yet at the place where a rewrite will flow naturally for me.
The curation failed? the email is empty for me
Yeah, it’s a bug related to EA Forum crossposts :(
Sadly the email was already out to everyone by the time we noticed, so not much we can do now.