It’s not totally clear to me how narrow or broad the ambit of LW posts should be in terms of how far they can stray from core questions of rationality. This post seems no farther from that core than other posts that appear here, but then maybe some of those shouldn’t be here either.
In any case, the thing that I think gives this an LW-type flavor is that it’s an example of how you can use a certain kind of argument to bully your opponents. One side in the argument takes a legitimate value that no one can dispute (unlimited power by judges is bad) and then, by what pretty much amounts to a rhetorical trick, sets things up so that anyone who attempts to reasonably trade that value off against other values stands accused of abandoning the value entirely. This leads to a situation where the guy on the other side of the argument comes out sounding unpersuasive, but only because he’s got to conduct the argument within the unfavorable constraints set up by the first guy.
Maybe you still don’t buy this as being close enough to core LW topics to belong here, or maybe I didn’t make the link explicit enough in the post.
One thing I’ve tried to do when posting is to look at the site’s mast and run its mission statement through my mind at the start and at the end of writing: “refining the art of human rationality”, and how is my post going to contribute to that precisely? What will my readers do or think after reading that they didn’t before?
This is known among article writers as the “so what” test.
Also, you have a higher bar to clear for non-US readers, and I’m one of those (probably atypical in that I’m actually a little interested in US constitutional law). You may not have thought enough about your audience, as this excerpt suggests: “we could get rid of the silly system we have now”.
You could call this the Kemo Sabe test, after the cartoon in which the Lone Ranger and Tonto find themselves surrounded by angry Indians, the LR says “We’re in trouble, Tonto”—and the latter replies “Who’s this ‘we’ that you speak of, Kemo Sabe?”
To summarize, I’ve downvoted this for failing two major relevance tests.
There seems to be a norm against heavy edits to top-level posts. I can see some reasons for such a norm, but they seem outweighed by the benefit of improving the posts. Maybe someone can set me straight on that.
Anyway, I’d like to encourage authors to revise top-level posts more, and in that spirit I’ll declare here, not just for this post but more generally, my willingness to change downvotes to neutral or even upvotes whenever an author makes the effort, as you did, to discover what readers are not liking, and then makes revisions to their post to address these issues.
Good point on the Americocentrism. I’ll keep that in mind.
I appreciate your appreciation of my attempt to make my point better in the above comment. I don’t know if it caused Eliezer or any other readers to now agree that it is a point that belongs on LW, but either way I think it improved matters at least somewhat. But I don’t think I agree that it would be a good thing if everybody started editing top-level posts, because then the comments made before the revisions would no longer make sense. And I also suspect that a bunch of edits in response to comments would often make the final product worse and not better. I think the way to handle situations like this is in the comments as was the case here, and hopefully those will guide future top-level posts that as a result will have fewer problems to begin with.
Why’s this on LW?
It’s not totally clear to me how narrow or broad the ambit of LW posts should be in terms of how far they can stray from core questions of rationality. This post seems no farther from that core than other posts that appear here, but then maybe some of those shouldn’t be here either.
In any case, the thing that I think gives this an LW-type flavor is that it’s an example of how you can use a certain kind of argument to bully your opponents. One side in the argument takes a legitimate value that no one can dispute (unlimited power by judges is bad) and then, by what pretty much amounts to a rhetorical trick, sets things up so that anyone who attempts to reasonably trade that value off against other values stands accused of abandoning the value entirely. This leads to a situation where the guy on the other side of the argument comes out sounding unpersuasive, but only because he’s got to conduct the argument within the unfavorable constraints set up by the first guy.
Maybe you still don’t buy this as being close enough to core LW topics to belong here, or maybe I didn’t make the link explicit enough in the post.
One thing I’ve tried to do when posting is to look at the site’s mast and run its mission statement through my mind at the start and at the end of writing: “refining the art of human rationality”, and how is my post going to contribute to that precisely? What will my readers do or think after reading that they didn’t before?
This is known among article writers as the “so what” test.
Also, you have a higher bar to clear for non-US readers, and I’m one of those (probably atypical in that I’m actually a little interested in US constitutional law). You may not have thought enough about your audience, as this excerpt suggests: “we could get rid of the silly system we have now”.
You could call this the Kemo Sabe test, after the cartoon in which the Lone Ranger and Tonto find themselves surrounded by angry Indians, the LR says “We’re in trouble, Tonto”—and the latter replies “Who’s this ‘we’ that you speak of, Kemo Sabe?”
To summarize, I’ve downvoted this for failing two major relevance tests.
There seems to be a norm against heavy edits to top-level posts. I can see some reasons for such a norm, but they seem outweighed by the benefit of improving the posts. Maybe someone can set me straight on that.
Anyway, I’d like to encourage authors to revise top-level posts more, and in that spirit I’ll declare here, not just for this post but more generally, my willingness to change downvotes to neutral or even upvotes whenever an author makes the effort, as you did, to discover what readers are not liking, and then makes revisions to their post to address these issues.
Good point on the Americocentrism. I’ll keep that in mind.
I appreciate your appreciation of my attempt to make my point better in the above comment. I don’t know if it caused Eliezer or any other readers to now agree that it is a point that belongs on LW, but either way I think it improved matters at least somewhat. But I don’t think I agree that it would be a good thing if everybody started editing top-level posts, because then the comments made before the revisions would no longer make sense. And I also suspect that a bunch of edits in response to comments would often make the final product worse and not better. I think the way to handle situations like this is in the comments as was the case here, and hopefully those will guide future top-level posts that as a result will have fewer problems to begin with.
There has to be another example of this phenomenon that doesn’t come from such a political issue.