I felt uncomfortable with and confused by the section of the post that was about jargon and euphemisms.
E.g., Masrani writes “No single individual is more of an expert in morality than another, and we all have a right to ask for these ideas to be expressed in plain english.”
I definitely think that people sometimes use jargon unnecessarily or fail to explain jargon when they should’ve.
And it seemed to me that this section of the post implied that various authors were deliberately being hard to understand in order to make it less likely that they’d be held accountable, or something like that.
(Though it’s possible that I just happened to incorrectly get that “vibe”, and that that wasn’t an implication Masrani intended.)
And I definitely think that some people are more of an expert in morality than other people, in one relevant sense of “expertise”—namely, having thought more about it, having more useful concepts, knowing who the other people to talk to about related things are, etc.
I’m not very confident that these people will tend to have better bottom-line views about morality than other people (though I tentatively think they would).
But I do think I’ll learn more about morality by talking to them than by talking to a randomly chosen member of the world population.
Also worth noting that there are a bunch of other more accessible descriptions of longtermism out there and this is specifically a formal definition aimed at an academic audience (by virtue of being a GPI paper)
I felt uncomfortable with and confused by the section of the post that was about jargon and euphemisms.
E.g., Masrani writes “No single individual is more of an expert in morality than another, and we all have a right to ask for these ideas to be expressed in plain english.”
I definitely think that people sometimes use jargon unnecessarily or fail to explain jargon when they should’ve.
See also 3 suggestions about jargon in EA.
But I also think jargon can be very useful.
And it seemed to me that this section of the post implied that various authors were deliberately being hard to understand in order to make it less likely that they’d be held accountable, or something like that.
(Though it’s possible that I just happened to incorrectly get that “vibe”, and that that wasn’t an implication Masrani intended.)
And I definitely think that some people are more of an expert in morality than other people, in one relevant sense of “expertise”—namely, having thought more about it, having more useful concepts, knowing who the other people to talk to about related things are, etc.
I’m not very confident that these people will tend to have better bottom-line views about morality than other people (though I tentatively think they would).
But I do think I’ll learn more about morality by talking to them than by talking to a randomly chosen member of the world population.
Also worth noting that there are a bunch of other more accessible descriptions of longtermism out there and this is specifically a formal definition aimed at an academic audience (by virtue of being a GPI paper)