My post are badly-argued. For instance, the Effective Egoist one was very short and implicit, and did not give any precise/well-justified arguments.
I’ve only read two of your posts but this is the thing I noticed. For Effective Egoist, the farther something is from the accepted set of priors for a community the more justification it needs. The only way I could see that article changing my mind is if I already bought the original premise and just had to slightly shift my conclusion. Your arguments were each only a few sentences long and you didn’t address any of the obvious counter arguments in the original article so nobody with different priors was going to come out of that article feeling changed.
I also read the dating one and it didn’t feel like it made any strong claims. It started off going in the same direction as the posts that go into the math behind “if you want to be married by X age, date Y people and then marry the next person better than the best person you’ve dated so far”, but then doesn’t actually get to that point. It then goes on to say you’ve had poor experiences with online dating and meeting people through friends so you did better going out to events. Which is a decent conclusion and possibly worth a post telling people to stop wasting resources on things that aren’t paying off for them… but it comes off more as the afterthought the way it’s packed into the middle of a different section. If that’s your conclusion it should have its own pretty header and a bit more support.
Overall, it feels like your actual claims aren’t supported by the rest of your writing and I don’t feel like someone who doesn’t already agree with you will walk away with a positive view of your writing.
This might be a structural problem that comes with practice. Unfortunately for readers, recognizing structural problems and being able to point them out and describe them is also a skill that comes with practice.
I’ve only read two of your posts but this is the thing I noticed. For Effective Egoist, the farther something is from the accepted set of priors for a community the more justification it needs. The only way I could see that article changing my mind is if I already bought the original premise and just had to slightly shift my conclusion. Your arguments were each only a few sentences long and you didn’t address any of the obvious counter arguments in the original article so nobody with different priors was going to come out of that article feeling changed.
I also read the dating one and it didn’t feel like it made any strong claims. It started off going in the same direction as the posts that go into the math behind “if you want to be married by X age, date Y people and then marry the next person better than the best person you’ve dated so far”, but then doesn’t actually get to that point. It then goes on to say you’ve had poor experiences with online dating and meeting people through friends so you did better going out to events. Which is a decent conclusion and possibly worth a post telling people to stop wasting resources on things that aren’t paying off for them… but it comes off more as the afterthought the way it’s packed into the middle of a different section. If that’s your conclusion it should have its own pretty header and a bit more support.
Overall, it feels like your actual claims aren’t supported by the rest of your writing and I don’t feel like someone who doesn’t already agree with you will walk away with a positive view of your writing.
This might be a structural problem that comes with practice. Unfortunately for readers, recognizing structural problems and being able to point them out and describe them is also a skill that comes with practice.