I just… I don’t… Why do people feel the need to do this on Eliezer’s posts so much? Why can he not make a single statement without somebody finding some obscure, improbable, irrelevent exception, and loudly trumpeting it? Going through the sequence reruns, it’s appalling how many people in the comments from the OB days just seem to be wilfully missing the point for the sake of generating a defensible disagreement.
Is it a desire to demonstrate how clever they are by being contrary, even if the disagreement is over some wholly irrelevent nitpick? Do they really think that the existence of imaginable but implausible exceptions is important? Is it just extreme, unrestrained pedantry?
All it does is pollute the discussion. If you don’t believe the exceptions to the “buying lottery tickets is stupid” rule are common enough to be significant, and you don’t believe that Eliezer thinks so either, and you don’t believe anybody reading the post is going to be adversely affected by Eliezer’s failure to explicitly mention these contrived exceptions to the rule, then why even bring it up?
ETA: And if you do believe any of those things, why?
Seriously, why can’t we just say that buying lottery tickets is stupid?
The answer is: because that would be a silly over-generalisation. Gambling is sometimes a rational course of action. It is good for people to be aware of that—in case they find themselves needing to gamble—a common circumstance—especially for males.
Roulette is often better than buying lottery tickets for large sums—due to taxation issues. However, in some countries, there’s a government-run lottery and many other forms of gambling are illegal.
Can you confidently assert (p > 0.8) that, since the advent of modern lotteries, at least a thousand people have arrived independently in circumstances under which buying lottery tickets was a non-stupid action?
Can you confidently assert (p > 0.8) that, since the advent of modern lotteries, at least a thousand people have arrived independently in circumstances under which buying lottery tickets was a non-stupid action?
That sounds reasonable to me—though it is not what I claimed. For instance, if someone in authority tells you to buy a lottery ticket for them.
I just… I don’t… Why do people feel the need to do this on Eliezer’s posts so much? Why can he not make a single statement without somebody finding some obscure, improbable, irrelevent exception, and loudly trumpeting it? Going through the sequence reruns, it’s appalling how many people in the comments from the OB days just seem to be wilfully missing the point for the sake of generating a defensible disagreement.
Is it a desire to demonstrate how clever they are by being contrary, even if the disagreement is over some wholly irrelevent nitpick? Do they really think that the existence of imaginable but implausible exceptions is important? Is it just extreme, unrestrained pedantry?
All it does is pollute the discussion. If you don’t believe the exceptions to the “buying lottery tickets is stupid” rule are common enough to be significant, and you don’t believe that Eliezer thinks so either, and you don’t believe anybody reading the post is going to be adversely affected by Eliezer’s failure to explicitly mention these contrived exceptions to the rule, then why even bring it up?
ETA: And if you do believe any of those things, why?
I generally agree with your post, but this phrasing is too strong.
It’s a net bad, but there are good consequences.
The original post asks:
The answer is: because that would be a silly over-generalisation. Gambling is sometimes a rational course of action. It is good for people to be aware of that—in case they find themselves needing to gamble—a common circumstance—especially for males.
Roulette is often better than buying lottery tickets for large sums—due to taxation issues. However, in some countries, there’s a government-run lottery and many other forms of gambling are illegal.
Note that the economist Robin Hanson made exactly the same point as me here.
Can you confidently assert (p > 0.8) that, since the advent of modern lotteries, at least a thousand people have arrived independently in circumstances under which buying lottery tickets was a non-stupid action?
What kind of circumstances were they?
That sounds reasonable to me—though it is not what I claimed. For instance, if someone in authority tells you to buy a lottery ticket for them.