The author shares how terrible it feels that X is true, without bringing arguments for X being true in the first place (based on me skimming the post). That can bypass the reader’s fact-check (because why would he write about how bad it made him feel that X is true if it wasn’t?).
It feels to me like he’s trying to combine an emotional exposition (no facts, talking about his feelings) with an expository blogpost (explaining a topic), while trying to grab the best of both worlds (the persuasiveness and emotions of the former and the social status of the latter) without the substance to back it up.
Two points of order, without going into any specific accusations or their absence:
The post is transphobic, which anticorrelates with being correct/truthful/objective.
It seems optimized for smoothness/persuasion, which, based on my experience, also anticorrelates with both truth and objectivity.
What seems optimized for smoothness/persuasion?
The author shares how terrible it feels that X is true, without bringing arguments for X being true in the first place (based on me skimming the post). That can bypass the reader’s fact-check (because why would he write about how bad it made him feel that X is true if it wasn’t?).
It feels to me like he’s trying to combine an emotional exposition (no facts, talking about his feelings) with an expository blogpost (explaining a topic), while trying to grab the best of both worlds (the persuasiveness and emotions of the former and the social status of the latter) without the substance to back it up.
Sorry, you’re going to need to be more specific. What particular claim X have I asserted is true without bringing arguments for it? Reply!
I agree that I’m combining emotional autobiography with topic exposition, but the reason I’m talking about my autobiography at all is because I tried object-level topic exposition for years—in such posts as “The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions” (2018), “Where to Draw the Boundaries?” (2019), “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception” (2021), and “Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal” (2022)—and it wasn’t working. From my perspective, the only thing left to do was jump up a metal level and talk about why it wasn’t working. If your contention is that I don’t have the substance to back up my claims, I think you should be able to explain what I got wrong in those posts. Reply!
Reply!