While the MoR example is a good one, don’t bother defending Eliezer’s response to the linked post. “Something bad is now arbitrarily good, what do you do?” is a poor strawman to counter “Two good things are opposed to each other in a trade space, how do you optimize?”
Don’t get me wrong, I like most of what Eliezer has put out here on this site, but it seems that he gets wound up pretty easily and off the cuff comments from him aren’t always as well reasoned as his main posts. To allow someone to slide based on the halo effect on a blog about rationality is just wrong. Calling people out when they do something wrong—and being civil about it—is constructive, and let’s not forget it’s in the name of the site.
“Something bad is now arbitrarily good, what do you do?” is a poor strawman to counter “Two good things are opposed to each other in a trade space, how do you optimize?”
OW’s linked post still looks to me more like “Two good things are hypothetically opposed to each other because I arbitrarily say so.”
While the MoR example is a good one, don’t bother defending Eliezer’s response to the linked post. “Something bad is now arbitrarily good, what do you do?” is a poor strawman to counter “Two good things are opposed to each other in a trade space, how do you optimize?”
Don’t get me wrong, I like most of what Eliezer has put out here on this site, but it seems that he gets wound up pretty easily and off the cuff comments from him aren’t always as well reasoned as his main posts. To allow someone to slide based on the halo effect on a blog about rationality is just wrong. Calling people out when they do something wrong—and being civil about it—is constructive, and let’s not forget it’s in the name of the site.
OW’s linked post still looks to me more like “Two good things are hypothetically opposed to each other because I arbitrarily say so.”