It’s not clear whether or not that important difference is supposed to imply to the reader that one is better then the other. Given that there seems to be a clear value judgement in the others, maybe it does here?
All three paragraphs starting with “There’s an important difference [...]” are trying to illustrate the distinction between choosing a model because it reflects value-relevant parts of reality (which I think is good), and choosing a model because of some non-reality-mapping consequences of the choice of model (which I think is generally bad).
words that are unnecessarily obscure (most people in society won’t understand what wasting cycles is about)
The primary audience of this post is longtime Less Wrong readers; as an author, I’m not concerned with trying to reach “most people in society” with this post. I expect Less Wrong readers to have trained up generalization instincts motivating the leap to thinking about AIs or minds-in-general even though this would seem weird or incomprehensible to the general public.
To those people who proofread and appeartly didn’t find an issue in that sentence, is it really necessary to mix all those different issues into a 6-line sentence?
It’s true that I tend to have a “dense” writing style (with lots of nested parentheticals and subordinate clauses), and that I should probably work on writing more simply in order to be easier to read. Sorry.
All three paragraphs starting with “There’s an important difference [...]” are trying to illustrate the distinction between choosing a model because it reflects value-relevant parts of reality (which I think is good), and choosing a model because of some non-reality-mapping consequences of the choice of model (which I think is generally bad).
The primary audience of this post is longtime Less Wrong readers; as an author, I’m not concerned with trying to reach “most people in society” with this post. I expect Less Wrong readers to have trained up generalization instincts motivating the leap to thinking about AIs or minds-in-general even though this would seem weird or incomprehensible to the general public.
It’s true that I tend to have a “dense” writing style (with lots of nested parentheticals and subordinate clauses), and that I should probably work on writing more simply in order to be easier to read. Sorry.