Whew! That’s a lot. I’m not going to try to answer all of that.
In short: I think you’re correctly following LW norms. You’re right that I wasn’t careful about tone, and by the norms here it’s good to note that.
And also, that wasn’t what this piece was about.
I intended it as an invitation. Not as a set of claims to evaluate.
If you look where I’m pointing, and you recognize some of yourself in it (which it sounds like you don’t!), then the suggestions I gesture toward (like Irene Lyon, and maybe loosening the mental grip on the doomy thoughts) might seem worth exploring.
I have no intention of putting an argument together, with evidence and statistics and the like, validating the mechanisms I’m talking about. That would actually go in the opposite direction of making an audible invitation.
But! I think your contribution is good. It’s maybe a little more indignant than necessary. But it’s… mmm… fitting, I’ll say.
I think it would be more-graceful of you to just admit that it is possible that there may be more than one reason for people to be in terror of the end of the world, and likewise qualify your other claims to certainty and universality.
That’s the main point of what gjm wrote. I’m sympathetic to the view you’re trying to communicate, Valentine; but you used words that claim that what you say is absolute, immutable truth, and that’s the worst mind-killer of all. Everything you wrote just above seems to me to be just equivocation trying to deny that technical yet critical point.
I understand that you think that’s just a quibble, but it really, really isn’t. Claiming privileged access to absolute truth on LessWrong is like using the N-word in a speech to the NAACP. It would do no harm to what you wanted to say to use phrases like “many people” or even “most people” instead of the implicit “all people”, and it would eliminate a lot of pushback.
Whew! That’s a lot. I’m not going to try to answer all of that.
In short: I think you’re correctly following LW norms. You’re right that I wasn’t careful about tone, and by the norms here it’s good to note that.
And also, that wasn’t what this piece was about.
I intended it as an invitation. Not as a set of claims to evaluate.
If you look where I’m pointing, and you recognize some of yourself in it (which it sounds like you don’t!), then the suggestions I gesture toward (like Irene Lyon, and maybe loosening the mental grip on the doomy thoughts) might seem worth exploring.
I have no intention of putting an argument together, with evidence and statistics and the like, validating the mechanisms I’m talking about. That would actually go in the opposite direction of making an audible invitation.
But! I think your contribution is good. It’s maybe a little more indignant than necessary. But it’s… mmm… fitting, I’ll say.
I’ll leave it at that.
I think it would be more-graceful of you to just admit that it is possible that there may be more than one reason for people to be in terror of the end of the world, and likewise qualify your other claims to certainty and universality.
That’s the main point of what gjm wrote. I’m sympathetic to the view you’re trying to communicate, Valentine; but you used words that claim that what you say is absolute, immutable truth, and that’s the worst mind-killer of all. Everything you wrote just above seems to me to be just equivocation trying to deny that technical yet critical point.
I understand that you think that’s just a quibble, but it really, really isn’t. Claiming privileged access to absolute truth on LessWrong is like using the N-word in a speech to the NAACP. It would do no harm to what you wanted to say to use phrases like “many people” or even “most people” instead of the implicit “all people”, and it would eliminate a lot of pushback.
(I see that this comment has received a lot of downvotes None of them is from me.)