I’m not entirely sure what I want the longterm rule to be, but I do think it’s bad for the comment section of Killing Socrates to be basically discussing @Said Achmiz specifically where Said can’t comment. It felt a bit overkill to make an entire separate overflow post for a place where Said could argue back, but it seemed like this post might be a good venue for it.
I will probably weigh in here with my own thoughts, although not sure if I’ll get to it today.
I appreciate the consideration. I don’t know that I particularly have anything novel or interesting to say about the post in question; I think it mostly stands (or, rather, falls) on its own, and any response I could make would merely repeat things that I’ve said many times. I could say those things again, but what would be the point? Nobody will hear them who hasn’t already heard. (In any case, some decent responses have already been written by other commenters.)
There is one part (actually a quote from Vaniver) which I want to object to, specifically in the context of my work:
There’s a claim I saw and wished I had saved the citation of, where a university professor teaching an ethics class or w/e gets their students to design policies that achieve ends, and finds that the students (especially more ‘woke’ ones) have very sharp critical instincts, can see all of the ways in which policies are unfair or problematic or so on, and then are very reluctant to design policies themselves, and are missing the skills to do anything that they can’t poke holes in (or, indeed, missing the acceptance that sometimes tradeoffs require accepting that the plan will have problems). In creative fields, this is sometimes called the Taste Gap, where doing well is hard in part because you can recognize good work before you can do it, and so the experience of making art is the experience of repeatedly producing disappointing work.
In order to get the anagogic ascent, you need both the criticism of Socrates and the courage to keep on producing disappointing work (and thus a system that rewards those in balanced ways).
In my professional (design) experience, I have found the above to be completely untrue.
My work is by no means perfect now, nor was it perfect when I started; nor will I claim that I’ve learned nothing and have not improved. But it’s simply not the case that I started out “repeatedly producing disappointing work” and only then (and thereby) learned to make good work. On the contrary, I started out with a strong sense and a good understanding of what bad design was, and what made it bad; and then I just didn’t do those things. Instead of doing bad and wrong things, I did good and correct things. Knowing what is good and what is bad, and why, made that relatively straightforward.
(Is there a “rationality lesson” to be drawn from this? I don’t know; perhaps, perhaps not. But it stands as a non-metaphorical point, either way.)
I’m not entirely sure what I want the longterm rule to be, but I do think it’s bad for the comment section of Killing Socrates to be basically discussing @Said Achmiz specifically where Said can’t comment. It felt a bit overkill to make an entire separate overflow post for a place where Said could argue back, but it seemed like this post might be a good venue for it.
I will probably weigh in here with my own thoughts, although not sure if I’ll get to it today.
I appreciate the consideration. I don’t know that I particularly have anything novel or interesting to say about the post in question; I think it mostly stands (or, rather, falls) on its own, and any response I could make would merely repeat things that I’ve said many times. I could say those things again, but what would be the point? Nobody will hear them who hasn’t already heard. (In any case, some decent responses have already been written by other commenters.)
There is one part (actually a quote from Vaniver) which I want to object to, specifically in the context of my work:
In my professional (design) experience, I have found the above to be completely untrue.
My work is by no means perfect now, nor was it perfect when I started; nor will I claim that I’ve learned nothing and have not improved. But it’s simply not the case that I started out “repeatedly producing disappointing work” and only then (and thereby) learned to make good work. On the contrary, I started out with a strong sense and a good understanding of what bad design was, and what made it bad; and then I just didn’t do those things. Instead of doing bad and wrong things, I did good and correct things. Knowing what is good and what is bad, and why, made that relatively straightforward.
(Is there a “rationality lesson” to be drawn from this? I don’t know; perhaps, perhaps not. But it stands as a non-metaphorical point, either way.)