It’s true that Open Philanthropy’s public communication tends toward a cautious, serious tone (and I think there are good reasons for this); but beyond that, I don’t think we do much to convey the sort of attitude implied above. [...] We never did any sort of push to have it treated as a fancy report.
The ability to write in a facetious tone is wonderful addition to one’s writing toolset, equivalent to the ability to use fewersignificant digits. This is a separate feature from the feature of “fun to read” and “irreverent”. People routinely mistake formalese for some kind of completeness/rigor, and the ability to counter that incorrect inference in them is very useful.
This routine mistake is common knowledge (at least after this comment ;). So “We never did any sort of push to have it treated as fancy” becomes about as defensible as “We never pushed for the last digits in the point estimate ’45,321 hair on my head’ to be treated as exact”, which… is admittedly kinda unfair. Mainly because it’s a much harder execution than replacing some digits with zeros.
Eliezer is facetiously pointing out the non-facetiousness in your report (and therefore doing some of the facetiousness-work for you), and here you solemnly point out the hedged-by-default status of it, which… is admittedly kinda fair. But I’m glad this whole exchange (enabled by facetiousness) happened, because it did cause the hedged-by-default-ness to be emphasized.
(I know you said you have good reasons for a serious tone. I do believe there are good reasons for it, such as having to get through to people who wouldn’t take it seriously otherwise, or some other silly Keynesian beauty contest. But my guess is that those constraints would apply less on what you post to this forum, which is evidence that this is more about labor and skill than a carefully-arrived-at choice.)
The ability to write in a facetious tone is wonderful addition to one’s writing toolset, equivalent to the ability to use fewer significant digits. This is a separate feature from the feature of “fun to read” and “irreverent”. People routinely mistake formalese for some kind of completeness/rigor, and the ability to counter that incorrect inference in them is very useful.
This routine mistake is common knowledge (at least after this comment ;). So “We never did any sort of push to have it treated as fancy” becomes about as defensible as “We never pushed for the last digits in the point estimate ’45,321 hair on my head’ to be treated as exact”, which… is admittedly kinda unfair. Mainly because it’s a much harder execution than replacing some digits with zeros.
Eliezer is facetiously pointing out the non-facetiousness in your report (and therefore doing some of the facetiousness-work for you), and here you solemnly point out the hedged-by-default status of it, which… is admittedly kinda fair. But I’m glad this whole exchange (enabled by facetiousness) happened, because it did cause the hedged-by-default-ness to be emphasized.
(I know you said you have good reasons for a serious tone. I do believe there are good reasons for it, such as having to get through to people who wouldn’t take it seriously otherwise, or some other silly Keynesian beauty contest. But my guess is that those constraints would apply less on what you post to this forum, which is evidence that this is more about labor and skill than a carefully-arrived-at choice.)