A 10lb weight might be tough for one person to do a particular exercise with, but trivial for another person. Does that mean the weight shouldn’t be labeled?
How would we quantify relative weights if we didn’t have mass as a globally agreed-upon metric to order them by? I think we could do better-than-nothing by comparing relative weight: In a world without lbs and kg, a gym could still mark one dumbbell as being the smallest, the next one up as being above the smallest, the next as being above the second, and so on.
In the domain of content, we similarly lack an objective scale of absolute weight, but it’s still often better than nothing to flag “heavier than you might be expecting”.
Do you get annoyed at stores that put out a “wet floor” sign after mopping, if you personally happen to have good balance and be wearing non-slip shoes? Or do you accept that convention as existing to help people who are in a worse situation than yours, such as being infirm or poorly shod, avoid a kind of mishap that’s not relevant to you?
The problem is not that there is a distribution of X along a spectrum, more so a problem that X is arbitrarily defined by each imperfect agent with some non-zero degree of self-serving goals, and that each agent can secretly coordinate with other agents.
So readers will always have the lingering suspicion that some amount of secret coordination is going on behind the scenes.
Of course this general principle applies to nearly everything, including every internet essay ever written, but it’s especially noticeable when very high levels of trust are needed in a community.
There is no such problem with physical units of measurement, such as mass, because no amount of political power, social status, etc., can even slightly tilt the meaning of 1 kg without a worldwide consensus.
Since billions of people have enough resources to independently verify what’s 1 kg or not, the effective outcome is a billion+ strong unanimous consensus. A consensus of a few dozen LW accounts is microscopic in comparison.
A 10lb weight might be tough for one person to do a particular exercise with, but trivial for another person. Does that mean the weight shouldn’t be labeled?
How would we quantify relative weights if we didn’t have mass as a globally agreed-upon metric to order them by? I think we could do better-than-nothing by comparing relative weight: In a world without lbs and kg, a gym could still mark one dumbbell as being the smallest, the next one up as being above the smallest, the next as being above the second, and so on.
In the domain of content, we similarly lack an objective scale of absolute weight, but it’s still often better than nothing to flag “heavier than you might be expecting”.
Do you get annoyed at stores that put out a “wet floor” sign after mopping, if you personally happen to have good balance and be wearing non-slip shoes? Or do you accept that convention as existing to help people who are in a worse situation than yours, such as being infirm or poorly shod, avoid a kind of mishap that’s not relevant to you?
The problem is not that there is a distribution of X along a spectrum, more so a problem that X is arbitrarily defined by each imperfect agent with some non-zero degree of self-serving goals, and that each agent can secretly coordinate with other agents.
So readers will always have the lingering suspicion that some amount of secret coordination is going on behind the scenes.
Of course this general principle applies to nearly everything, including every internet essay ever written, but it’s especially noticeable when very high levels of trust are needed in a community.
There is no such problem with physical units of measurement, such as mass, because no amount of political power, social status, etc., can even slightly tilt the meaning of 1 kg without a worldwide consensus.
Since billions of people have enough resources to independently verify what’s 1 kg or not, the effective outcome is a billion+ strong unanimous consensus. A consensus of a few dozen LW accounts is microscopic in comparison.