On reflection I realise that in some sense the heart of my objection to the post was in vibe, and I think I was subconsciously trying to correct for this by leaning into the vibe (for my response) of “this seems wrongfooted”.
But I do think the post tries to caveat a lot and it overall seems good for there to be a forum where even minor considerations can be considered in a quick post., so I thought it was worth posting.
I quite agree that it’s good if even minor considerations can be considered in a quick post. I think the issue is that the tone of the post is kind of didactic, let-me-explain-all-these-things (and the title is “an argument for X”, and the post begins “I used to think not-X”): combined these are projecting quite a sense of “X is solid”, and while it’s great that it had lots of explicit disclaimers about this just being one consideration etc., I don’t think they really do the work of cancelling the tone for feeding into casual readers’ gut impressions.
For an exaggerated contrast, imagine if the post read like:
A quick thought on earning-to-save
I’ve been wondering recently about whether earning-to-save could make sense. I’m still not sure what I think, but I did come across a perspective which could justify it.
[argument goes here]
What do people think? I haven’t worked out how big a deal this seems compared to the considerations against earning to save (and some of them are pretty substantial), so it might still be a pretty bad idea overall.
I think that would have triggered approximately zero of my vibe concerns.
Alternatively I think it could have worked to have a didactic post on “Considerations around earning-to-save” that felt like it was trying to collect the important considerations (which I’m not sure have been well laid out anywhere, so there might not be a canonical sense of which arguments are “new”) rather than particularly emphasise one consideration.
That’s fair—I was aiming to write it in a crisp way to make it easier to engage with, but I agree I could have given the argument crisply with a better introduction.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
On reflection I realise that in some sense the heart of my objection to the post was in vibe, and I think I was subconsciously trying to correct for this by leaning into the vibe (for my response) of “this seems wrongfooted”.
I quite agree that it’s good if even minor considerations can be considered in a quick post. I think the issue is that the tone of the post is kind of didactic, let-me-explain-all-these-things (and the title is “an argument for X”, and the post begins “I used to think not-X”): combined these are projecting quite a sense of “X is solid”, and while it’s great that it had lots of explicit disclaimers about this just being one consideration etc., I don’t think they really do the work of cancelling the tone for feeding into casual readers’ gut impressions.
For an exaggerated contrast, imagine if the post read like:
I think that would have triggered approximately zero of my vibe concerns.
Alternatively I think it could have worked to have a didactic post on “Considerations around earning-to-save” that felt like it was trying to collect the important considerations (which I’m not sure have been well laid out anywhere, so there might not be a canonical sense of which arguments are “new”) rather than particularly emphasise one consideration.
That’s fair—I was aiming to write it in a crisp way to make it easier to engage with, but I agree I could have given the argument crisply with a better introduction.