Compare these considerations: (1) I believe it’s better to not have posts like this, (2) it’s just better to change posts like this in a way that makes them more widely useful. Of these, (2) can’t bring about an improvement by a large margin, since heterosexual males form a sizeable portion of the readership, possibly more than half (given the gender imbalance), so its relevance seems more likely to come from either urge to rationalize (1) without admitting it as an actual reason (perhaps subconsciously), or from expecting people who don’t benefit from the post to dislike its presence, which is again a special case of (1).
I believe it’s better not to have posts like this, because it has a lot of irrelevant fluff that could be cut—it’s an article that mixes rationality and dating advice. I want the article which is just the rationality, without the dating advice. I’m not sure which box that falls under. Alicorn’s post was ostensibly on the same subject, and struck me as well written and unobjectionable, so it’s clearly not just an objection to mentions of romantic life.
Also, if the audience is “possibly more than half”, that implies that (2) could double the usefulness of the post… I’m not sure how a suggestion to double the usefulness of a post is “not a large margin of improvement”.
I believe it’s better not to have posts like this, because it has a lot of irrelevant fluff that could be cut
Again, if you are suggesting an improvement, this doesn’t clearly argue for not having posts that are not so improved. For this to matter, the post as it stands has to be bad, but its hypothetical improved version has to cross over into the “good” category. Improving relevance doesn’t seem like a strong enough change to do this trick, it seems like the character of an adequate such improvement must be that of “fixing a damaging problem”, rather than that of “making the presentation even better”. You’d need to address this problem, otherwise all I hear is a fake explanation.
Compare these considerations: (1) I believe it’s better to not have posts like this, (2) it’s just better to change posts like this in a way that makes them more widely useful. Of these, (2) can’t bring about an improvement by a large margin, since heterosexual males form a sizeable portion of the readership, possibly more than half (given the gender imbalance), so its relevance seems more likely to come from either urge to rationalize (1) without admitting it as an actual reason (perhaps subconsciously), or from expecting people who don’t benefit from the post to dislike its presence, which is again a special case of (1).
I believe it’s better not to have posts like this, because it has a lot of irrelevant fluff that could be cut—it’s an article that mixes rationality and dating advice. I want the article which is just the rationality, without the dating advice. I’m not sure which box that falls under. Alicorn’s post was ostensibly on the same subject, and struck me as well written and unobjectionable, so it’s clearly not just an objection to mentions of romantic life.
Also, if the audience is “possibly more than half”, that implies that (2) could double the usefulness of the post… I’m not sure how a suggestion to double the usefulness of a post is “not a large margin of improvement”.
Again, if you are suggesting an improvement, this doesn’t clearly argue for not having posts that are not so improved. For this to matter, the post as it stands has to be bad, but its hypothetical improved version has to cross over into the “good” category. Improving relevance doesn’t seem like a strong enough change to do this trick, it seems like the character of an adequate such improvement must be that of “fixing a damaging problem”, rather than that of “making the presentation even better”. You’d need to address this problem, otherwise all I hear is a fake explanation.