Thank you very much, Ben. By and large, I think the summary is fine, but I think I would like to clarify the following things.
First, I am unsure about the “useful for most people to read” part. Obviously, many people like the essay, and I am not sure what makes political opinion essays “useful”. Of course there will be many people who find it useful to link to the text. Similarly, I am unsure how timeless it is; if it makes a post timeless that it is exemplary for the political sentiment of lesswrong in June/May 2020, then sure this seems to be timeless (which you can see because it is curated). But I am negative about the explain vs persuade part. Admittedly, this essay may be characterized by a third category additional to these two, but I believe as a curated lesswrong post that is explicitly intended to be used as a reference, it will rather be used to persuade on politics without explaining.
Secondly, the WHO having an “inability to plan” sounds a bit different from “no ability to plan”. In my understanding, the first is a matter of opinion, the second is absurd as a description of basically any organization. But maybe I am overinterpreting. I think I understand what Zvi is saying about sacrifices, though I am not really sure.
You say “the political sentiment of lesswrong” and “persuade on politics”; if we replace “politics” with “a model of world affairs” or “a view about the state of the world’s main decisionmaking institutions” or the like, that changes my intuitive response to your comment a fair bit.
There are risks to talking about world affairs or the state of the US government on LW, and the risks may outweigh the benefits. But in a relatively utopian version of LW, at least, in a world where it was possible to do so without a bunch of bad side-effects, I think there would be a lot of curated “politics” content in the sense of “content that aids in understanding the current state of the world and its institutions”, even though there are other interpretations of “politics” according to which politics doesn’t belong on the LW front page.
In this utopian version of LW, I think some curated posts would focus on defending models, while others would focus on presenting new models for evaluation or summarizing previously-defended models.
(This abstract point seems more important to me than the question of whether Zvi’s post in particular would be curated in utopian-LW.)
Thank you very much, Ben. By and large, I think the summary is fine, but I think I would like to clarify the following things.
First, I am unsure about the “useful for most people to read” part. Obviously, many people like the essay, and I am not sure what makes political opinion essays “useful”. Of course there will be many people who find it useful to link to the text. Similarly, I am unsure how timeless it is; if it makes a post timeless that it is exemplary for the political sentiment of lesswrong in June/May 2020, then sure this seems to be timeless (which you can see because it is curated). But I am negative about the explain vs persuade part. Admittedly, this essay may be characterized by a third category additional to these two, but I believe as a curated lesswrong post that is explicitly intended to be used as a reference, it will rather be used to persuade on politics without explaining.
Secondly, the WHO having an “inability to plan” sounds a bit different from “no ability to plan”. In my understanding, the first is a matter of opinion, the second is absurd as a description of basically any organization. But maybe I am overinterpreting. I think I understand what Zvi is saying about sacrifices, though I am not really sure.
You say “the political sentiment of lesswrong” and “persuade on politics”; if we replace “politics” with “a model of world affairs” or “a view about the state of the world’s main decisionmaking institutions” or the like, that changes my intuitive response to your comment a fair bit.
There are risks to talking about world affairs or the state of the US government on LW, and the risks may outweigh the benefits. But in a relatively utopian version of LW, at least, in a world where it was possible to do so without a bunch of bad side-effects, I think there would be a lot of curated “politics” content in the sense of “content that aids in understanding the current state of the world and its institutions”, even though there are other interpretations of “politics” according to which politics doesn’t belong on the LW front page.
In this utopian version of LW, I think some curated posts would focus on defending models, while others would focus on presenting new models for evaluation or summarizing previously-defended models.
(This abstract point seems more important to me than the question of whether Zvi’s post in particular would be curated in utopian-LW.)
I think I agree to all of what you say, except that I am unsure whether it is about what I wrote.