I strongly suggest you rewrite your summary of “physical limitations”. The original was slightly problematic; your summary is, to me, a train-wreck.
Scott’s original point was, I believe, “slavery itself may be an example of a bad collective equilibrium, but work-people-to-death antebellum southern slavery was even worse than that.” He spent so much effort showing how the WPTD version was inefficient that he forgot to reiterate the obvious point that both versions are morally bad; and since he was contrasting the two, it would be possible to infer that he’s actually saying that non-WPTD slavery is not so bad morally; but he clearly deserves the benefit of the doubt on that, and anybody who’s read that far is likely to give it to him.
Your summary is shorter, so it’s easier to misinterpret, and “people unlikely to give you the benefit of the doubt” are more likely to read it. Furthermore, using “you” to mean slavers makes it actually worse than Scott’s version. I, for one, really don’t want to be asked to put myself into slavers’ shoes unless it’s crucial to the point being made, and in this case it clearly isn’t.
I suggest you remove the “you” phrasing, and also explicitly say that even non-WPTD slavery is bad; that this is an example of physical limitations slightly ameliorating a bad equilibrium, but not removing it altogether. You can, I believe, safely imply that that’s what Scott believes too, even though he doesn’t explicitly say it.
Happy to delete the word ‘you’ there since it’s doing no work. Not going to edit this version, but will update OP and mods are free to fix this one. Also took opportunity to do a sentence break-up.
As for saying explicitly that slavery is bad, well, pretty strong no. I’m not going to waste people’s time doing that, nor am I going to invite further concern trolling, or the implication that when I do not explicitly condemn something it means I might secretly support it or something. If someone needs reassurance that someone talking about slavery as one of the horrible things also opposes a less horrible form of slavery, then they are not the target audience.
I think that I am probably inside the set you’d consider “target audience”, though not a central member. To me, when you say “strong no” it sounds somewhat like “if somebody misunderstands me, it’s their fault,” which I’d think is a bad reaction.
I realize that what I’m asking for could be considered SJW virtue-signaling, and I understand that one possible reaction to such a request is “ew, no, that’s not my tribe.” However, I think there’s reasons aside from signaling or counter-signaling to consider my request.
To me, one goal of a summary section like the one in question is to allow the reader to grasp the basic flavor of the argument in question without too much mental work. That might, in some cases, mean it’s worth explicitly saying things that were implicit in the unabridged original, because the quicker read might leave such implicit ideas less obvious. In particular, to me, it’s important that these “physical limitations” don’t actually remove the badness of the equilibrium, they just moderate it slightly. That flows obviously to me when reading Scott’s full original; with your summary, it’s still obvious, but in a way that breaks the flow and requires me to stop and think “there’s something left unsaid here”. In a summary section, such a break in the flow seems better avoided.
Are you saying that you, personally, were confused about whether Zvi (or Scott) does, or does not, support slavery? Is that actually something that you were unsure whether you had understood properly?
I’m reading Jameson as just saying that, from an editing standpoint, the wording was sufficiently confusing and had to stop for a few seconds to figure out that this wasn’t what Zvi was saying. Like, he didn’t believe Zvi believed it, but it nonetheless read like that for a minute.
I did a little more work to make it flow better in OP, and I’m going to let it drop there unless a bunch of other people confirm they had this same issue and it actually mattered (and with the new version).
I strongly suggest you rewrite your summary of “physical limitations”. The original was slightly problematic; your summary is, to me, a train-wreck.
Scott’s original point was, I believe, “slavery itself may be an example of a bad collective equilibrium, but work-people-to-death antebellum southern slavery was even worse than that.” He spent so much effort showing how the WPTD version was inefficient that he forgot to reiterate the obvious point that both versions are morally bad; and since he was contrasting the two, it would be possible to infer that he’s actually saying that non-WPTD slavery is not so bad morally; but he clearly deserves the benefit of the doubt on that, and anybody who’s read that far is likely to give it to him.
Your summary is shorter, so it’s easier to misinterpret, and “people unlikely to give you the benefit of the doubt” are more likely to read it. Furthermore, using “you” to mean slavers makes it actually worse than Scott’s version. I, for one, really don’t want to be asked to put myself into slavers’ shoes unless it’s crucial to the point being made, and in this case it clearly isn’t.
I suggest you remove the “you” phrasing, and also explicitly say that even non-WPTD slavery is bad; that this is an example of physical limitations slightly ameliorating a bad equilibrium, but not removing it altogether. You can, I believe, safely imply that that’s what Scott believes too, even though he doesn’t explicitly say it.
Happy to delete the word ‘you’ there since it’s doing no work. Not going to edit this version, but will update OP and mods are free to fix this one. Also took opportunity to do a sentence break-up.
As for saying explicitly that slavery is bad, well, pretty strong no. I’m not going to waste people’s time doing that, nor am I going to invite further concern trolling, or the implication that when I do not explicitly condemn something it means I might secretly support it or something. If someone needs reassurance that someone talking about slavery as one of the horrible things also opposes a less horrible form of slavery, then they are not the target audience.
I think that I am probably inside the set you’d consider “target audience”, though not a central member. To me, when you say “strong no” it sounds somewhat like “if somebody misunderstands me, it’s their fault,” which I’d think is a bad reaction.
I realize that what I’m asking for could be considered SJW virtue-signaling, and I understand that one possible reaction to such a request is “ew, no, that’s not my tribe.” However, I think there’s reasons aside from signaling or counter-signaling to consider my request.
To me, one goal of a summary section like the one in question is to allow the reader to grasp the basic flavor of the argument in question without too much mental work. That might, in some cases, mean it’s worth explicitly saying things that were implicit in the unabridged original, because the quicker read might leave such implicit ideas less obvious. In particular, to me, it’s important that these “physical limitations” don’t actually remove the badness of the equilibrium, they just moderate it slightly. That flows obviously to me when reading Scott’s full original; with your summary, it’s still obvious, but in a way that breaks the flow and requires me to stop and think “there’s something left unsaid here”. In a summary section, such a break in the flow seems better avoided.
Are you saying that you, personally, were confused about whether Zvi (or Scott) does, or does not, support slavery? Is that actually something that you were unsure whether you had understood properly?
I’m reading Jameson as just saying that, from an editing standpoint, the wording was sufficiently confusing and had to stop for a few seconds to figure out that this wasn’t what Zvi was saying. Like, he didn’t believe Zvi believed it, but it nonetheless read like that for a minute.
(Either way, I don’t care about it very much.)
Exactly, thank you.
I did a little more work to make it flow better in OP, and I’m going to let it drop there unless a bunch of other people confirm they had this same issue and it actually mattered (and with the new version).