To be honest I am not sure what exactly is being advised.
I am basically advising that you treat the concept of PR, and the word “PR”, the way you would treat a skilled but incredibly sleazy used car salesman. You may sometimes wish to deal with him anyway, if you can’t practically locate any other way to buy a car. But you’ll want to be very very alert to what’s being slipped into “your” “beliefs”, while you do so.
Sort of like if you were using a concept from Scientology to navigate a personal psychological issue.
Do you think trying to be ‘honorable’ will suffice to avoid bad outcomes?
I think that attention to “honor”, “reputation”, “brand”, etc. will get us most but not all of what we might hope for from PR, and including some things that PR itself won’t give, such as some kinds of longer-term freedom, grounding, and ability to think.
I would advise using this concept first (just, very simply, substituting the word “reputational concerns” for “PR concerns” in conversations, and seeing where this substitution gets you).
I don’t think it’ll do everything PR would do. And I’m not saying you should never care about the residual (although I am saying that the sleazy car salesman may have tricked us into sometimes thinking the residual matters more than it does).
But you’ll want to be very very alert to what’s being slipped into “your” “beliefs”, while you do so.
Also consider what slips into your beliefs while you’re sitting a bubble of people who mostly talk to each other, and think they are much better than the wicked world outside.
My downvote here is not for TAG holding the hypothesis that the rationalist/LW bubble might be bad in various ways (this is an inoffensive hypothesis to hold, in my culture) but rather for its method of sly insinuation that tries to score a point without sticking its neck out and making a clear and falsifiable claim.
If I can be shown that I’ve misread TAG, I’ll remove the downvote.
Yeah, seems right to me. I would be interested in a concrete argument here, but it feels like the above could be said about any group, and it doesn’t present me with any additional information or arguments. I can imagine TAG having a good critique here and would be interested in hearing it, but the above didn’t do it for me.
I just re-read the OP looking for something that I’d possibly describe as “sly insinuations about the PR industry”, and I couldn’t find any. What I read in it was a bunch of straight-forward claims about what the concept of PR tends to cause in people who use it, and some as-far-as-I-can-tell-completely-honest attempts to gesture at intuitions about how that works and why. Can you give an example of something in the OP that seems to you like it contains a sly insinuation about the PR industry?
What I read in it was a bunch of straight-forward claims about what the concept of PR tends to cause
What I didn’t read was support for those claims. Well, maybe “PR bad” is a thing everyone knows..but maybe “ingroups can get delusional about their moral purity” is something everyone knows.
I am basically advising that you treat the concept of PR, and the word “PR”, the way you would treat a skilled but incredibly sleazy used car salesman. You may sometimes wish to deal with him anyway, if you can’t practically locate any other way to buy a car. But you’ll want to be very very alert to what’s being slipped into “your” “beliefs”, while you do so.
Sort of like if you were using a concept from Scientology to navigate a personal psychological issue.
I think that attention to “honor”, “reputation”, “brand”, etc. will get us most but not all of what we might hope for from PR, and including some things that PR itself won’t give, such as some kinds of longer-term freedom, grounding, and ability to think.
I would advise using this concept first (just, very simply, substituting the word “reputational concerns” for “PR concerns” in conversations, and seeing where this substitution gets you).
I don’t think it’ll do everything PR would do. And I’m not saying you should never care about the residual (although I am saying that the sleazy car salesman may have tricked us into sometimes thinking the residual matters more than it does).
Also consider what slips into your beliefs while you’re sitting a bubble of people who mostly talk to each other, and think they are much better than the wicked world outside.
My downvote here is not for TAG holding the hypothesis that the rationalist/LW bubble might be bad in various ways (this is an inoffensive hypothesis to hold, in my culture) but rather for its method of sly insinuation that tries to score a point without sticking its neck out and making a clear and falsifiable claim.
If I can be shown that I’ve misread TAG, I’ll remove the downvote.
Yeah, seems right to me. I would be interested in a concrete argument here, but it feels like the above could be said about any group, and it doesn’t present me with any additional information or arguments. I can imagine TAG having a good critique here and would be interested in hearing it, but the above didn’t do it for me.
It was. Feeling that your in-group deals in The Truth is the default.
I think it would be fairer to downvote the OP for making sly insinuations about the PR industry.
I just re-read the OP looking for something that I’d possibly describe as “sly insinuations about the PR industry”, and I couldn’t find any. What I read in it was a bunch of straight-forward claims about what the concept of PR tends to cause in people who use it, and some as-far-as-I-can-tell-completely-honest attempts to gesture at intuitions about how that works and why. Can you give an example of something in the OP that seems to you like it contains a sly insinuation about the PR industry?
What I didn’t read was support for those claims. Well, maybe “PR bad” is a thing everyone knows..but maybe “ingroups can get delusional about their moral purity” is something everyone knows.
Hm. For the record, I find this thought to be worth chewing on, so thank you.