I’ve already replied above, but I respect you, RobbBB, so I’ll reply here also. I don’t believe life is zero-sum. I believe that people who think it is are more likely to act like the narrator of this post.
I don’t understand why anyone thinks I’m speaking seriously and in my own voice. I don’t think life is a zero-sum game. That kind of thinking leads to “dark side” behavior, and motivates people to behave the way this post’s narrator recommends.
Contrast the reception this post has had with my earlier post on presuppositions, which had all the same attributes being downvoted here. LessWrong, you are inconsistent.
So is everyone expected to be familiar with you as someone with a long-established track record that will be contrasted with what you write in this post? I’d expect a bunch of people coming in will not have any sort of model of you and draw all their conclusions about whatever your actual voice is like from this one post.
The agent LessWrong is a big community of different people who are likely to come and go and change a lot over a 2-year timespan, so ‘you are inconsistent’ is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. (And not necessarily a criticism!)
Your previous post strikes me as fun and well-written, but thin. Good for a one-off joke, but I’d expect follow-ups to be more detailed, and to link back to old antecedents or background material. It’s not super surprising that a similar concept could fail if we don’t control for execution; and the concept you’re trying to teach here is a lot more obvious and widely acknowledged than the Using Presuppositions concept, so this has much lower VOI.
That’s a fair critique, if it is widely acknowledged. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before, thought. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Let’s present three alternatives, because we know what happens if you only present two.”
I mean that the polarizing effect of false dichotomies is pretty obvious. I should clarify that the part of your post that isn’t obvious, also doesn’t seem at all plausible to me, and isn’t defended, if part of the message is supposed to be that dualism is always to be avoided when possible. Frequently, it’s much better to present two options than three—it’s simpler, and any trilemma can in any case be converted into a disjunctive dilemma.
I don’t understand why you postulate that “life is a zero-sum game” in this post. What is this one person’s gain that is another person’s loss here?
Since he believes life is zero-sum, maybe he’s altruistically trying to get us to down-vote him so we can benefit from his misfortune.
It finally makes sense.
I’ve already replied above, but I respect you, RobbBB, so I’ll reply here also. I don’t believe life is zero-sum. I believe that people who think it is are more likely to act like the narrator of this post.
It’s OK; I didn’t believe you believed life was zero-sum.
But, if getting downvoted is what he wants, then it is not a misfortune...
I don’t understand why anyone thinks I’m speaking seriously and in my own voice. I don’t think life is a zero-sum game. That kind of thinking leads to “dark side” behavior, and motivates people to behave the way this post’s narrator recommends.
Contrast the reception this post has had with my earlier post on presuppositions, which had all the same attributes being downvoted here. LessWrong, you are inconsistent.
one of those posts refers to real life examples and does not present itself in a vacuum with a blatantly untrue or not always true messages.
So is everyone expected to be familiar with you as someone with a long-established track record that will be contrasted with what you write in this post? I’d expect a bunch of people coming in will not have any sort of model of you and draw all their conclusions about whatever your actual voice is like from this one post.
The agent LessWrong is a big community of different people who are likely to come and go and change a lot over a 2-year timespan, so ‘you are inconsistent’ is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. (And not necessarily a criticism!)
Your previous post strikes me as fun and well-written, but thin. Good for a one-off joke, but I’d expect follow-ups to be more detailed, and to link back to old antecedents or background material. It’s not super surprising that a similar concept could fail if we don’t control for execution; and the concept you’re trying to teach here is a lot more obvious and widely acknowledged than the Using Presuppositions concept, so this has much lower VOI.
That’s a fair critique, if it is widely acknowledged. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before, thought. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Let’s present three alternatives, because we know what happens if you only present two.”
I mean that the polarizing effect of false dichotomies is pretty obvious. I should clarify that the part of your post that isn’t obvious, also doesn’t seem at all plausible to me, and isn’t defended, if part of the message is supposed to be that dualism is always to be avoided when possible. Frequently, it’s much better to present two options than three—it’s simpler, and any trilemma can in any case be converted into a disjunctive dilemma.
Knowing your style, I did not assume it’s your actual position. Still, your assumptions were not clear to me, so I asked.