My intention was not to dismiss or downplay the importance of various values, but instead to clarify our values by making careful distinctions. It is reasonable to critique my language for being too dry, detached, and academic when these are serious topics with real-world stakes. But to the extent you’re claiming that I am actually trying to dismiss the value of happiness and friendships, that was simply not part of the post.
I can’t (and didn’t) speak to your intention, but I can speak of the results, which are that you do in fact down-play the importance of values such as love, laughter, happiness, fun, family, and friendship in favor of values like the maximization of pleasure, preference-satisfaction, and short-term increases in wealth & life-spans. I can tell because you talk of the latter, but not of the former.
And regardless of your intention you do also dismiss their long-term value, by decrying those who hold their long-term value utmost as “speciesist”.
you do in fact down-play the importance of values such as love, laughter, happiness, fun, family, and friendship in favor of values like the maximization of pleasure, preference-satisfaction [...] I can tell because you talk of the latter, but not of the former.
This seems like an absurd characterization. The concepts of pleasure and preference satisfaction clearly subsume, at least in large part, values such as happiness and fun. The fact that I did not mention each of the values you name individually does not in any way imply that I am downplaying them. Should I have listed every conceivable value that people think might have value, to avoid this particular misinterpretation?
Even if I were downplaying these values, which I did not, it would hardly matter to at all to the substance of the essay, since my explicit arguments are independent from the mere vibe you get from reading my essay. LessWrong is supposed to be a place for thinking clearly and analyzing arguments based on their merits, not for analyzing whether authors are using rhetoric that feels “alarming” to one’s values (especially when the rhetoric is not in actual fact alarming in the sense described, upon reading it carefully).
I can’t (and didn’t) speak to your intention, but I can speak of the results, which are that you do in fact down-play the importance of values such as love, laughter, happiness, fun, family, and friendship in favor of values like the maximization of pleasure, preference-satisfaction, and short-term increases in wealth & life-spans. I can tell because you talk of the latter, but not of the former.
And regardless of your intention you do also dismiss their long-term value, by decrying those who hold their long-term value utmost as “speciesist”.
This seems like an absurd characterization. The concepts of pleasure and preference satisfaction clearly subsume, at least in large part, values such as happiness and fun. The fact that I did not mention each of the values you name individually does not in any way imply that I am downplaying them. Should I have listed every conceivable value that people think might have value, to avoid this particular misinterpretation?
Even if I were downplaying these values, which I did not, it would hardly matter to at all to the substance of the essay, since my explicit arguments are independent from the mere vibe you get from reading my essay. LessWrong is supposed to be a place for thinking clearly and analyzing arguments based on their merits, not for analyzing whether authors are using rhetoric that feels “alarming” to one’s values (especially when the rhetoric is not in actual fact alarming in the sense described, upon reading it carefully).