I say this as genuine feedback, not a snipe: Use more spellcheck next time. Less concretely, use more editing, of which spellcheck is one method. I think your post would have stood stronger if it had incorporated some feedback before publishing! You have many small things you say which indicate what seems to be a confusion you have about what people say, and people will tell you this if you ask.
Hi Alex, I did not see you comments until now, and I actually upvote them—first, because I think that the criticism is both fair and very respectful, and also because I truely appreciate that you give informative feedback rather than just downvoting and letting me guess the problems.
I have the disadvantage of not being a native English-speaker, and I certainly need to put more effort to spelling and editing.
About the “feedback before publishing”—do you have a suggestion for how to do it if I don’t have connections with people who are interested in the same subjects?
And about the small confusions—it is interesting, but I’m not sure I understand. Would you please say more about it?
If the program has not ended, there is a feedback and proofreading service that you can access, which would be really helpful if you don’t have any local proofreaders for making sure the audience will understand you.
Don’t put more effort into spellcheck, just paste your essay into a wordprocessor that has spellcheck! Spelling is so uninteresting that you should find the easiest way to touch it up.
Small confusions:
I don’t know why you have a model which goes from man to woman along 1 axis instead of, say, many. You didn’t give any reason to think of 1 axis instead of 2 or 3 or 4, so I don’t know why we stopped there.
The “Guns” section is very short. I don’t know how it connects to the rest of the essay
The “Gods” section is very short. I don’t know how it connects to the rest of the essay.
The “Gods” section says “So even bad-faith arguments have their pros”, but the examples given are about times we were wrong. It doesn’t make sense to me. I think you are saying “We disagreed with creationists, so we had to learn more about evolution and natural selection and more”, but this doesn’t seem right. We didn’t learn more so we could disagree with creationists, we disagree after and because we learned. If you were an atheist with no proof (and the Christians appeared to have proof), you’d be silly and not very rational.
The many-dimension thing is a different way to generalise the naive model, and I. Didn’t want to analyze both in the same post because I feared it may become too dense. Thanks to you I understand that it is so popular that choosing to avoid it can not be done implicitly.
About your last point I sort-of disagree, in a way that point to another place where I wasn’t clear enough. I think that many of the arguments made by even the most serious theologians where so obviously bad that their counter-arguments where only needed in order to explicitly state why it is so obvious that they are bad. I am in great doubt that existence by definition prevented anyone from becoming atheist, even before there were tools to show exactly why it can never work.
Do you think that there is any point to edit now? I’m not sure what is the chance that anyone would read it.
If you downvote, I’d appreciate an explanation as well, even if you PM me so you don’t incur downvotes as well. I also will not respond to your feedback unless you ask for it, to lower the cost of giving some even more. Thanks.
I say this as genuine feedback, not a snipe: Use more spellcheck next time. Less concretely, use more editing, of which spellcheck is one method. I think your post would have stood stronger if it had incorporated some feedback before publishing! You have many small things you say which indicate what seems to be a confusion you have about what people say, and people will tell you this if you ask.
Hi Alex, I did not see you comments until now, and I actually upvote them—first, because I think that the criticism is both fair and very respectful, and also because I truely appreciate that you give informative feedback rather than just downvoting and letting me guess the problems.
I have the disadvantage of not being a native English-speaker, and I certainly need to put more effort to spelling and editing.
About the “feedback before publishing”—do you have a suggestion for how to do it if I don’t have connections with people who are interested in the same subjects?
And about the small confusions—it is interesting, but I’m not sure I understand. Would you please say more about it?
If the program has not ended, there is a feedback and proofreading service that you can access, which would be really helpful if you don’t have any local proofreaders for making sure the audience will understand you.
Don’t put more effort into spellcheck, just paste your essay into a wordprocessor that has spellcheck! Spelling is so uninteresting that you should find the easiest way to touch it up.
Small confusions:
I don’t know why you have a model which goes from man to woman along 1 axis instead of, say, many. You didn’t give any reason to think of 1 axis instead of 2 or 3 or 4, so I don’t know why we stopped there.
The “Guns” section is very short. I don’t know how it connects to the rest of the essay
The “Gods” section is very short. I don’t know how it connects to the rest of the essay.
The “Gods” section says “So even bad-faith arguments have their pros”, but the examples given are about times we were wrong. It doesn’t make sense to me. I think you are saying “We disagreed with creationists, so we had to learn more about evolution and natural selection and more”, but this doesn’t seem right. We didn’t learn more so we could disagree with creationists, we disagree after and because we learned. If you were an atheist with no proof (and the Christians appeared to have proof), you’d be silly and not very rational.
Thanks, there are many helpful points here.
The many-dimension thing is a different way to generalise the naive model, and I. Didn’t want to analyze both in the same post because I feared it may become too dense. Thanks to you I understand that it is so popular that choosing to avoid it can not be done implicitly.
About your last point I sort-of disagree, in a way that point to another place where I wasn’t clear enough. I think that many of the arguments made by even the most serious theologians where so obviously bad that their counter-arguments where only needed in order to explicitly state why it is so obvious that they are bad. I am in great doubt that existence by definition prevented anyone from becoming atheist, even before there were tools to show exactly why it can never work.
Do you think that there is any point to edit now? I’m not sure what is the chance that anyone would read it.
If you downvote, I’d appreciate an explanation as well, even if you PM me so you don’t incur downvotes as well. I also will not respond to your feedback unless you ask for it, to lower the cost of giving some even more. Thanks.
See my response to the main comment. What is PM by the way?
Private message. If you click on a user’s name, you find an option to message them. (Just click “Message”.)