Buddhism is a huge part of Joshin’s life (which seems fine to note), but if there’s an implied argument ‘Buddhism is causally responsible for this style of discourse’, ‘all Buddhists tend to be like this’, etc., you’ll have to spell that out more.
The explicit argument I would make here is, the post makes some reference to the author being Buddhist, and therefore less likely to say things they can’t verify. Or even things believed true that would cause drama. And then elaborates that the post will do both these things anyway, because there is a “conflict of interest” between speaking divisively against Aella, and speaking(?) divisively against those Jōshin seeks to warn away.
It is my understanding that whatever value one assigns to whisper networks, cancellations, and so on, “devout buddhist” is a social role that practically defines itself as foregoing that value in favor of inner peace, and that this contradiction is what Duncan found perhaps worthy of scorn. (The particular one-word comment has been correctly downvoted as having no place on LessWrong, at least according to a discourse norms pledge Duncan himself authored and various other of his posts.) In Jōshin’s shoes of having committed to X and finding ￢X to have profound importance to the safety of those around me, I would either try to fob off the publishing of the accusations onto someone else more comfortable with X to keep somewhat to the letter of the pledges, or lay out a stronger case for reneging on X in a separate post.
At minimum, any “so normally I avoid doing this even when it seems like a good idea, but” normnotes ought to go in something like a footnote, not up-front to emphasize that because something was a significant update for you it ought to be a more significant update to the reader. Certainly for audiences already not sharing your priors, such attempted emphasis as we see falls flat.
There is no such implied argument; the scare-quotes were an attempt to signal humor. Next time I’ll try something like:
″ ” Buddhists ” ”
… although hm, that might imply a criticism of the trueness/validity of Jōshin’s claim to Buddhism, which would also not be intended (since I lack any expertise whatsoever by which to judge).
I note that I’m pretty sure this is the exact same genre of humor as Villiam’s reply riffing off the same core concept (currently at +18 to my comment’s −6, and with no moderator commentary).
Which makes my primary hypothesis that people’s objection is not to the genre of joke, but to the amount of effort or the ambiguity or lack thereof or whatever. “You can tell this joke but only if you do it more skillfully.”
I wasn’t going to mention this but then your comment (which I upvoted) got a bunch of other upvotes, too, and I think there’s an inconsistency lurking somewhere around here.
On one hand, I was not scanning the rest of the thread for other stuff I might think is good or bad and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I had ended up unfairly signaling you out. I also think the karma in these threads gets particularly wacky and I don’t know what to do about it (I think agree/disagree helps a little but can only do so much), so I expect the karma scores here to be more intensified than is normal/reasonable.
But also I’m not sure what you’re referring to in Villiam’s comment.? Villiam’s comment upthread is making an argument (as a bit of biting humor thrown in, which I think is probably also kinda bad, but the humor felt incidental to making a point), and the “Buddhist” comment wasn’t making an argument, and that seemed like a pretty important distinction.
(I don’t think of this as a particularly important subthread, I had intended to just give your comment a weak downvote and move on with my day, and when you replied about it I had intended to just write up a quick one-liner explaining my thoughts but also didn’t mean to be making a big deal about it)
[removing my own self-upvote so that this doesn’t show up in recent discussion]
Buddhism is a huge part of Joshin’s life (which seems fine to note), but if there’s an implied argument ‘Buddhism is causally responsible for this style of discourse’, ‘all Buddhists tend to be like this’, etc., you’ll have to spell that out more.
The explicit argument I would make here is, the post makes some reference to the author being Buddhist, and therefore less likely to say things they can’t verify. Or even things believed true that would cause drama. And then elaborates that the post will do both these things anyway, because there is a “conflict of interest” between speaking divisively against Aella, and speaking(?) divisively against those Jōshin seeks to warn away.
It is my understanding that whatever value one assigns to whisper networks, cancellations, and so on, “devout buddhist” is a social role that practically defines itself as foregoing that value in favor of inner peace, and that this contradiction is what Duncan found perhaps worthy of scorn. (The particular one-word comment has been correctly downvoted as having no place on LessWrong, at least according to a discourse norms pledge Duncan himself authored and various other of his posts.) In Jōshin’s shoes of having committed to X and finding ￢X to have profound importance to the safety of those around me, I would either try to fob off the publishing of the accusations onto someone else more comfortable with X to keep somewhat to the letter of the pledges, or lay out a stronger case for reneging on X in a separate post.
At minimum, any “so normally I avoid doing this even when it seems like a good idea, but” normnotes ought to go in something like a footnote, not up-front to emphasize that because something was a significant update for you it ought to be a more significant update to the reader. Certainly for audiences already not sharing your priors, such attempted emphasis as we see falls flat.
There is no such implied argument; the scare-quotes were an attempt to signal humor. Next time I’ll try something like:
″ ” Buddhists ” ”
… although hm, that might imply a criticism of the trueness/validity of Jōshin’s claim to Buddhism, which would also not be intended (since I lack any expertise whatsoever by which to judge).
(fyi I think this genre of humor isn’t very good, or at least requires a higher trust group of people for me to think it’s good)
I note that I’m pretty sure this is the exact same genre of humor as Villiam’s reply riffing off the same core concept (currently at +18 to my comment’s −6, and with no moderator commentary).
Which makes my primary hypothesis that people’s objection is not to the genre of joke, but to the amount of effort or the ambiguity or lack thereof or whatever. “You can tell this joke but only if you do it more skillfully.”
I wasn’t going to mention this but then your comment (which I upvoted) got a bunch of other upvotes, too, and I think there’s an inconsistency lurking somewhere around here.
On one hand, I was not scanning the rest of the thread for other stuff I might think is good or bad and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I had ended up unfairly signaling you out. I also think the karma in these threads gets particularly wacky and I don’t know what to do about it (I think agree/disagree helps a little but can only do so much), so I expect the karma scores here to be more intensified than is normal/reasonable.
But also I’m not sure what you’re referring to in Villiam’s comment.? Villiam’s comment upthread is making an argument (as a bit of biting humor thrown in, which I think is probably also kinda bad, but the humor felt incidental to making a point), and the “Buddhist” comment wasn’t making an argument, and that seemed like a pretty important distinction.
(I don’t think of this as a particularly important subthread, I had intended to just give your comment a weak downvote and move on with my day, and when you replied about it I had intended to just write up a quick one-liner explaining my thoughts but also didn’t mean to be making a big deal about it)
[removing my own self-upvote so that this doesn’t show up in recent discussion]