Hi, and welcome to LessWrong! (I’m assuming you’re new around here because your first posts are from January.)
I hope you’ll keep posting, but I do want to provide a little bit of feedback. The following sections of your intro and disclaimers struck me as a bit condescending:
This most commonly manifests when we take the dumbest and most fundamentalist young Earth creationists as an example, winning easily against them, then claiming that we disproved all arguments ever made by any theist. No, this article will not be about whether God exists or not, or whether any real world religion is fundamentally right or wrong. I strongly discourage any discussion about these two topics.
Any discussion about any perceived proofs for or against the existence of God would be off-topic here. I know it’s tempting to show off your best proofs against your carefully constructed straw-men yet again, but this is just not the place for it, as it would detract from the main purpose of this article, as summarized in its introduction.
It sounds like you’ve been burned by some knee-jerk reactions on other discussion forums before. But reading the above paragraphs made me update away from thinking this article would have anything interesting to say.
LessWrong is not perfect, but I think we’re actually pretty good about not arguing against straw men. So your disclaimers struck me as walking into a place with high standards of discussion, and then telling everyone not to make basic 101 errors.
It sounds like you felt like you needed the disclaimers because of experiences on other sites, and that’s understandable. But, my hope is that if you stick around here and give us the benefit of the doubt not to respond to straw men, you’ll soon feel that such disclaimers aren’t necessary.
If on the other hand you do experience a lot of straw-manning on LW, I’d be curious to hear about it.
You are right that I’m not yet fully accustomed to the culture of this site, and I’ve seen some valid concerns about the formulation of some of my statements. Had I written this essay now after seeing some of the comments, I would have been probably somewhat less defensive. (Actually, most of my defensiveness comes from an observation that whenever theism came up in a main article, easily defeatable young earth creationists were prominently featured. Maybe it’s just a sampling problem, and by reading more articles here on that topic, it would seem less prominent) Nevertheless, you raise a valid point that my disclaimers were overdone.
Also, I should have mentioned some of the merits of Galilei in the article, instead of just acknowledging them in the comments, otherwise some might think that my goal was to flame against him. My main point was to show an example where seemingly rational scientific proofs can lead us astray, and to show a well-spread bias in popular history: upon these two pillars was my essay built. I should have striven to write it in a tone of a journal article, but as the topic was quite provocative knowing the ideological backgrounds of many readers, I went with a more provocative, sensationalist tone. Maybe I overdid it a little.
Is it a custom here to make such adjustments to an existing essay, or would people think that I did the changes to make their criticisms look unjustified?
Actually, most of my defensiveness comes from an observation that whenever theism came up in a main article, easily defeatable young earth creationists were prominently featured.
Ah, that makes sense. I have a better idea where you were coming from now.
Is it a custom here to make such adjustments to an existing essay, or would people think that I did the changes to make their criticisms look unjustified?
Yeah, I think it’s fairly common to make minor edits to a post. If you make a major change (adding or removing whole sections), then it might be helpful to include a note somewhere (e.g. at the bottom) saying that you’ve made such an edit just so people don’t get confused.
Actually, most of my defensiveness comes from an observation that whenever theism came up in a main article, easily defeatable young earth creationists were prominently featured. Maybe it’s just a sampling problem, and by reading more articles here on that topic, it would seem less prominent
Most of the time bashing theism isn’t the main point. It’s seldom interesting to engage with theism on a deep level to show it to be wrong.
This is not a place where we focus on bashing theism to make us feel better about ourselves.
Hi, and welcome to LessWrong! (I’m assuming you’re new around here because your first posts are from January.)
I hope you’ll keep posting, but I do want to provide a little bit of feedback. The following sections of your intro and disclaimers struck me as a bit condescending:
It sounds like you’ve been burned by some knee-jerk reactions on other discussion forums before. But reading the above paragraphs made me update away from thinking this article would have anything interesting to say.
LessWrong is not perfect, but I think we’re actually pretty good about not arguing against straw men. So your disclaimers struck me as walking into a place with high standards of discussion, and then telling everyone not to make basic 101 errors.
It sounds like you felt like you needed the disclaimers because of experiences on other sites, and that’s understandable. But, my hope is that if you stick around here and give us the benefit of the doubt not to respond to straw men, you’ll soon feel that such disclaimers aren’t necessary.
If on the other hand you do experience a lot of straw-manning on LW, I’d be curious to hear about it.
Cheers, and welcome once again.
Thank you for your patient words.
You are right that I’m not yet fully accustomed to the culture of this site, and I’ve seen some valid concerns about the formulation of some of my statements. Had I written this essay now after seeing some of the comments, I would have been probably somewhat less defensive. (Actually, most of my defensiveness comes from an observation that whenever theism came up in a main article, easily defeatable young earth creationists were prominently featured. Maybe it’s just a sampling problem, and by reading more articles here on that topic, it would seem less prominent) Nevertheless, you raise a valid point that my disclaimers were overdone.
Also, I should have mentioned some of the merits of Galilei in the article, instead of just acknowledging them in the comments, otherwise some might think that my goal was to flame against him. My main point was to show an example where seemingly rational scientific proofs can lead us astray, and to show a well-spread bias in popular history: upon these two pillars was my essay built. I should have striven to write it in a tone of a journal article, but as the topic was quite provocative knowing the ideological backgrounds of many readers, I went with a more provocative, sensationalist tone. Maybe I overdid it a little.
Is it a custom here to make such adjustments to an existing essay, or would people think that I did the changes to make their criticisms look unjustified?
Thanks again for the feedback.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
Ah, that makes sense. I have a better idea where you were coming from now.
Yeah, I think it’s fairly common to make minor edits to a post. If you make a major change (adding or removing whole sections), then it might be helpful to include a note somewhere (e.g. at the bottom) saying that you’ve made such an edit just so people don’t get confused.
Most of the time bashing theism isn’t the main point. It’s seldom interesting to engage with theism on a deep level to show it to be wrong. This is not a place where we focus on bashing theism to make us feel better about ourselves.