This is an excellent post. It has that rare quality, like much of the Sequences, of the ideas it describes being utterly obvious—in retrospect. (I also appreciate the similarly Sequence-like density of hyperlinks, exploiting the not-nearly-exploited-enough-these-days power of hypertext to increase density of ideas without a concomitant increase in abstruseness.)
… which is why I find it so puzzling to see all these disagreeing comments, which seem to me to contain an unusual, and puzzling, level of reflexive contrarianness and pedanticism.
I think my sense of miscommunication with you is that you don’t seem to have a sense of the law of equal and opposite advice + meta-contrarianism. Different things seem useful at different stages, and principle of charity means at least trying to see why what people are saying might be useful from their perspective.
This is an excellent post. It has that rare quality, like much of the Sequences, of the ideas it describes being utterly obvious—in retrospect. (I also appreciate the similarly Sequence-like density of hyperlinks, exploiting the not-nearly-exploited-enough-these-days power of hypertext to increase density of ideas without a concomitant increase in abstruseness.)
… which is why I find it so puzzling to see all these disagreeing comments, which seem to me to contain an unusual, and puzzling, level of reflexive contrarianness and pedanticism.
Excellent enough to be worthy of your nomination for the 2019 Review, perhaps??
Oh yeah, totally. I guess that’s going on now, then? I will try and figure out how one nominates things…
I think my sense of miscommunication with you is that you don’t seem to have a sense of the law of equal and opposite advice + meta-contrarianism. Different things seem useful at different stages, and principle of charity means at least trying to see why what people are saying might be useful from their perspective.
Er, sorry, did you mean to post this as a reply here? I’m not quite seeing the relevance…