I read the post & comment which you linked, and indeed felt that the critical comment was too combative. (As a counterexample, I like this criticism of EY for how civil it is.) That being said, I think I understand the sentiment behind its tone: the commenter saw your post make a bunch of strong claims, felt that these claims were wrong and/or insufficiently supported by sources, and wrote the critical comment in a moment of annoyance.
To give a concrete example, “We do not censor other people more conventional-minded than ourselves.” is an interesting but highly controversial claim. Both because hardly anything in the world has a 100% correlation, and because it leads to unintuitive logical implications like “two people cannot simultaneously want to censor one another”.
Anyway, given that the post began with a controversial claim, I expected the rest of the post to support this initial claim with lots of sources and arguments. Instead, you took the claim further and built on it. That’s a valid way to write, but it puts the essay in an awkward spot with readers that disagree with the initial claim. For this reason, I’m also a bit confused about the purpose of the essay: was it meant to be a libertarian manifesto, or an attempt to convince readers, or what? EDIT: Also, the majority of LW readers are not libertarians. What reaction did you expect to receive from them?
If I were to make a suggestion, the essay might have worked better if it had been a dialogue between a pro-liberty and a pro-censorship character. Why? Firstly, if readers feel like an argument is insufficiently supported, they can criticize or yell at the character, rather than at you. And secondly, such a dialogue would’ve required making a stronger case in favor of censorship, and it would’ve given the censorship character the opportunity to push back against claims by the liberty character. This would’ve forestalled having readers make similar counterarguments. (Also see Scott’s Nonfiction Writing Advice, section “Anticipate and defuse counterarguments”.)
Hi there, lsusr!
I read the post & comment which you linked, and indeed felt that the critical comment was too combative. (As a counterexample, I like this criticism of EY for how civil it is.) That being said, I think I understand the sentiment behind its tone: the commenter saw your post make a bunch of strong claims, felt that these claims were wrong and/or insufficiently supported by sources, and wrote the critical comment in a moment of annoyance.
To give a concrete example, “We do not censor other people more conventional-minded than ourselves.” is an interesting but highly controversial claim. Both because hardly anything in the world has a 100% correlation, and because it leads to unintuitive logical implications like “two people cannot simultaneously want to censor one another”.
Anyway, given that the post began with a controversial claim, I expected the rest of the post to support this initial claim with lots of sources and arguments. Instead, you took the claim further and built on it. That’s a valid way to write, but it puts the essay in an awkward spot with readers that disagree with the initial claim. For this reason, I’m also a bit confused about the purpose of the essay: was it meant to be a libertarian manifesto, or an attempt to convince readers, or what? EDIT: Also, the majority of LW readers are not libertarians. What reaction did you expect to receive from them?
If I were to make a suggestion, the essay might have worked better if it had been a dialogue between a pro-liberty and a pro-censorship character. Why? Firstly, if readers feel like an argument is insufficiently supported, they can criticize or yell at the character, rather than at you. And secondly, such a dialogue would’ve required making a stronger case in favor of censorship, and it would’ve given the censorship character the opportunity to push back against claims by the liberty character. This would’ve forestalled having readers make similar counterarguments. (Also see Scott’s Nonfiction Writing Advice, section “Anticipate and defuse counterarguments”.)