Uhm, didn’t downvote, but I wish your posting style could shift towards higher quality, and perhaps smaller frequency. (The frequency is not a problem per se, it’s the “high frequency of low quality” that gets annoying.)
Okay, this leaves a question of what exactly “higher quality” means, for which I cannot give you a satisfactory answer here. (I just decided to give a possibly unsatisfactory answer rather than staying silent.)
I like many of your ideas. I think a lot of them are great conversation starters. I just wish to see them written in a different form, if you want to post them on LW. My impression is that you open a possibly interesting topic, but then you write a long text which actually is not sufficiently “digested”. Like, you could have think about the topic more, debate with a few people, find some links… okay, maybe now I am pointing in a wrong direction here, I just feel that you didn’t do some homework, although I am not completely sure what that homework should be.
Also, you like to post about politics, or to drag politics into other topics. It’s not completely forbidden, but let’s say such things have a cost, so what exactly is the benefit here which would justify the cost? Speaking for myself, I never heard about Oakeshott, so why should I care about his opinions on rationality? (Maybe explaining who Oakeshott is and why should I care is the part of the “homework” you should have done. But maybe it just does not belong here.)
But this is Discussion, not the front page… isn’t anything that can start a discussion OK? Isn’t posts in Discussion should be seen as simply “first comment” ?
Look, if I had people to debate it with, I would not need LW as I could get sufficient feedback on them. Hm, this is a bit of a misunderstanding here. I thought it is generally seen so that discussion boards are people who are less social IRL, or their IRL social circle is uninterested in one of their interests.
Then I would suggest writing the article a bit differently… as an invitation to a debate, not as a solution. Instead of “here is a problem, and here is my solution”, something like “here is background, here is a problem… and I would like to hear your solutions in the comments”. That is: 1) be explicit that you want other people to write their opinion, and 2) avoid writing your own opinion as a part of the article. And maybe 3) provide some background so more people can join the debate.
Don’t get discouraged! Some of your articles are upvoted, so… uhm… seems like an opportunity to try making a hypothesis about “what is the difference between articles in this set, and in that set?” For example, my hypothesis would be that it depends on how much readers feel you give them the answer, or you ask them to write their own answer. But I could be wrong here.
OK, thanks, this is a good about. About politics… I am focusing on political philosophy and largely the skeptical subset of it (next would be John Kekes’s pluralism), that ought to be popular :)
Do you think starting a debate about the ethics of piracy / intellectual property would go down well? (From a pro-pirate angle, with an explicit goal to kill pop culture.)
From a pro-pirate angle, with an explicit goal to kill pop culture.
That’s just another form of politics.
Have you read the parts of Sequences about politics and motivated reasoning? (Short version is that “I will start chanting our slogans and give you selected arguments about why my side is better than the other side” does not contribute to epistemic rationality, and so we should not do it here.)
But I think I am “strong” enough to avoid my usual tribal arguments (“copy is not stealing as it does not remove the original”) and be fully consequentualist (“copying kills pop culture, and it is good because”) and how would that be a bad thing? My point is precisely that we are probably strong enough to discuss such topics without slogan-chanting and well within epistemic rationality.
And I am unsure how you didn’t recognize that the sentence you quoted is not the usual four-legs-good tribal chant but something with a clear consequence predicted which is easy to approach rationally (“what is the chance it kills pop culture?” “what is the chance good things happen if pop culture gets killed?”)
The entire point of “politics is the mind-killer” is that no, even here is not immune to tribalistic idea-warfare politics. The politics just get more complicated. And the stopgap solution until we figure out a way around that tendency, which doesn’t appear reliably avoidable, is to sandbox the topic and keep it limited. You should have a high prior that a belief that you can be “strong” is Dunning-Kruger talking.
You should have a high prior that a belief that you can be “strong” is Dunning-Kruger talking.
Okay, but feeling no passion, literally, no blood pressure rising isn’t a strong evidence there with few false positives? Does it have many false positives?
Sandboxing is okay, better than total taboo, this is why I recommended a quarantine. Or a biweekly thread.
Not if your primary goal is to generate open-ended discussion. (Putting forth an opinion too often divides your audience into two groups: “for” and “against”, even on LW.)
Uhm, didn’t downvote, but I wish your posting style could shift towards higher quality, and perhaps smaller frequency. (The frequency is not a problem per se, it’s the “high frequency of low quality” that gets annoying.)
Okay, this leaves a question of what exactly “higher quality” means, for which I cannot give you a satisfactory answer here. (I just decided to give a possibly unsatisfactory answer rather than staying silent.)
I like many of your ideas. I think a lot of them are great conversation starters. I just wish to see them written in a different form, if you want to post them on LW. My impression is that you open a possibly interesting topic, but then you write a long text which actually is not sufficiently “digested”. Like, you could have think about the topic more, debate with a few people, find some links… okay, maybe now I am pointing in a wrong direction here, I just feel that you didn’t do some homework, although I am not completely sure what that homework should be.
Also, you like to post about politics, or to drag politics into other topics. It’s not completely forbidden, but let’s say such things have a cost, so what exactly is the benefit here which would justify the cost? Speaking for myself, I never heard about Oakeshott, so why should I care about his opinions on rationality? (Maybe explaining who Oakeshott is and why should I care is the part of the “homework” you should have done. But maybe it just does not belong here.)
But this is Discussion, not the front page… isn’t anything that can start a discussion OK? Isn’t posts in Discussion should be seen as simply “first comment” ?
Look, if I had people to debate it with, I would not need LW as I could get sufficient feedback on them. Hm, this is a bit of a misunderstanding here. I thought it is generally seen so that discussion boards are people who are less social IRL, or their IRL social circle is uninterested in one of their interests.
Makes sense.
Then I would suggest writing the article a bit differently… as an invitation to a debate, not as a solution. Instead of “here is a problem, and here is my solution”, something like “here is background, here is a problem… and I would like to hear your solutions in the comments”. That is: 1) be explicit that you want other people to write their opinion, and 2) avoid writing your own opinion as a part of the article. And maybe 3) provide some background so more people can join the debate.
Don’t get discouraged! Some of your articles are upvoted, so… uhm… seems like an opportunity to try making a hypothesis about “what is the difference between articles in this set, and in that set?” For example, my hypothesis would be that it depends on how much readers feel you give them the answer, or you ask them to write their own answer. But I could be wrong here.
OK, thanks, this is a good about. About politics… I am focusing on political philosophy and largely the skeptical subset of it (next would be John Kekes’s pluralism), that ought to be popular :)
Do you think starting a debate about the ethics of piracy / intellectual property would go down well? (From a pro-pirate angle, with an explicit goal to kill pop culture.)
That’s just another form of politics.
Have you read the parts of Sequences about politics and motivated reasoning? (Short version is that “I will start chanting our slogans and give you selected arguments about why my side is better than the other side” does not contribute to epistemic rationality, and so we should not do it here.)
But I think I am “strong” enough to avoid my usual tribal arguments (“copy is not stealing as it does not remove the original”) and be fully consequentualist (“copying kills pop culture, and it is good because”) and how would that be a bad thing? My point is precisely that we are probably strong enough to discuss such topics without slogan-chanting and well within epistemic rationality.
And I am unsure how you didn’t recognize that the sentence you quoted is not the usual four-legs-good tribal chant but something with a clear consequence predicted which is easy to approach rationally (“what is the chance it kills pop culture?” “what is the chance good things happen if pop culture gets killed?”)
The entire point of “politics is the mind-killer” is that no, even here is not immune to tribalistic idea-warfare politics. The politics just get more complicated. And the stopgap solution until we figure out a way around that tendency, which doesn’t appear reliably avoidable, is to sandbox the topic and keep it limited. You should have a high prior that a belief that you can be “strong” is Dunning-Kruger talking.
Okay, but feeling no passion, literally, no blood pressure rising isn’t a strong evidence there with few false positives? Does it have many false positives?
Sandboxing is okay, better than total taboo, this is why I recommended a quarantine. Or a biweekly thread.
I disagree, if you are putting a issue before the LW crowd, showing what your preliminary thoughts about it are is highly useful.
Not if your primary goal is to generate open-ended discussion. (Putting forth an opinion too often divides your audience into two groups: “for” and “against”, even on LW.)