This article was hilarious. The criticisms of FDT are reliably way off base, and it’s clear that whoever had these didn’t bother to look up the historical context for these decision theories.
Firstly, this is false. MacAskill works in academic philosophy, and I’m confident he’s read up on decision theory a fair bit.
Secondly, it’s unkind and unfair to repeatedly describe how you’re laughing at someone, and it’s especially bad to do it instead of presenting a detailed argument, as you say you’re doing in your last sentence.
I don’t think this needs to rise to the level of a formal moderator warning, I just want to ask you to please not be mean like this on LessWrong in future. That said, I hope you do get around to writing up your critique of this post sometime.
Look, I never said it wasn’t a serious attempt to engage with the subject, and I respect that, and I respect the author(s).
Let me put it this way. If someone writes something unintentionally funny, are you laughing at them or at what they wrote? To me there is a clear separation between author and written text.
If you’ve heard of the TV show “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, that is an example of something I don’t laugh at, because it seems to be all people getting hurt.
If someone was truly hurt by my comment then I apologise. I did not mean it that way.
I still stand by the substance of my criticism though. The fact that I was amused has nothing to do with whether what I wrote was genuine—it was. It’s sort of… Who is at fault when someone misinterprets your tone online? I don’t think either party can really have a strong claim, because writing is extremely hard to get the tone right and then as a reader you don’t know the person who wrote it either, so you could have totally different expectations of what the author of a piece of writing is thinking. Not to mention online you’re very likely to be from different countries and cultural backgrounds, who have different norms.
As a further apology, I am very very unlikely to write any more detail on this unless the original article author messages me to ask me for it.
Firstly, this is false. MacAskill works in academic philosophy, and I’m confident he’s read up on decision theory a fair bit.
Secondly, it’s unkind and unfair to repeatedly describe how you’re laughing at someone, and it’s especially bad to do it instead of presenting a detailed argument, as you say you’re doing in your last sentence.
I don’t think this needs to rise to the level of a formal moderator warning, I just want to ask you to please not be mean like this on LessWrong in future. That said, I hope you do get around to writing up your critique of this post sometime.
Look, I never said it wasn’t a serious attempt to engage with the subject, and I respect that, and I respect the author(s).
Let me put it this way. If someone writes something unintentionally funny, are you laughing at them or at what they wrote? To me there is a clear separation between author and written text.
If you’ve heard of the TV show “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, that is an example of something I don’t laugh at, because it seems to be all people getting hurt.
If someone was truly hurt by my comment then I apologise. I did not mean it that way.
I still stand by the substance of my criticism though. The fact that I was amused has nothing to do with whether what I wrote was genuine—it was. It’s sort of… Who is at fault when someone misinterprets your tone online? I don’t think either party can really have a strong claim, because writing is extremely hard to get the tone right and then as a reader you don’t know the person who wrote it either, so you could have totally different expectations of what the author of a piece of writing is thinking. Not to mention online you’re very likely to be from different countries and cultural backgrounds, who have different norms.
As a further apology, I am very very unlikely to write any more detail on this unless the original article author messages me to ask me for it.