It’s just that if you [Nesov] say 100 negative things to me in a row without saying a single positive thing, I start to get the impression that you think everything I write is bad, and I should stop writing.
Would someone write 100 pieces of constructive criticism if they wanted you to stop writing? More likely they would just silently vote you down, or say “please stop writing”.
Besides what Nesov already said, I think a major cause of the frequent nit-picking and misinterpretations is that you’re following the (unfortunate, in my view) LW tradition of writing sequences that hide the overall point/conclusions until the end. I’ve made this complaint before (to someone else, but it’s the same complaint).
In addition to what I said last time about telegraphing conclusions helping to avoid ambiguities, if I don’t know what your overall conclusions are, then I can’t tell which errors in a given post are relevant to your conclusions and therefore should be pointed out, and which can be safely ignored. And given how important this topic is, Nesov might think that it’s safer to err on the side of too much rather than too little nit-picking. Also it’s sometimes unclear which of your posts are meant to be part of your FAI-relevant meta-ethics sequence (as opposed to intended to help LWers improve their human rationality or are just of general interest to LW readers), so Nesov might unnecessarily hold them all to the same high standard intended for FAI-relevant discussion. For example, is your latest post “Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations?” supposed to be part of that sequence?
Would someone write 100 pieces of constructive criticism if they wanted you to stop writing? More likely they would just silently vote you down, or say “please stop writing”.
Besides what Nesov already said, I think a major cause of the frequent nit-picking and misinterpretations is that you’re following the (unfortunate, in my view) LW tradition of writing sequences that hide the overall point/conclusions until the end. I’ve made this complaint before (to someone else, but it’s the same complaint).
In addition to what I said last time about telegraphing conclusions helping to avoid ambiguities, if I don’t know what your overall conclusions are, then I can’t tell which errors in a given post are relevant to your conclusions and therefore should be pointed out, and which can be safely ignored. And given how important this topic is, Nesov might think that it’s safer to err on the side of too much rather than too little nit-picking. Also it’s sometimes unclear which of your posts are meant to be part of your FAI-relevant meta-ethics sequence (as opposed to intended to help LWers improve their human rationality or are just of general interest to LW readers), so Nesov might unnecessarily hold them all to the same high standard intended for FAI-relevant discussion. For example, is your latest post “Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations?” supposed to be part of that sequence?
Fair enough. I’ll try to make things clearer in some upcoming posts.
‘Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations’ is of course relevant to ethics but it’s not technically part of my metaethics sequence.