I find it weird that just because I think a point is poorly presented, people think I disagree with the point.
Sorry! I never meant to imply that you disagree with the point.
My comment in this case is more: How would you have actually wanted Robin Hanson to phrase his point? I’ve thought about that issue a good amount, and like, I feel like it’s just a really hard point to make. I am honestly curious what other thing you would have preferred Hanson to say instead. The thing he said seemed overall pretty clear to me, and really not like an attempt to be intentionally edge or something, and more that the point he wanted to make kind of just had a bunch of inconvenient consequences that were difficult to explore (similarly to how utilitarianism quickly gives rise to a number of hard to discuss consequences that are hard to explore).
My guess is you can probably come up with something better, but that it would take you substantial time (> 10 minutes) of thinking.
My argument here is mostly: In context, the thing that Robin said seemed fine, and I don’t expect that many people who read that blogpost actually found his phrasing that problematic. The thing that I expect to have happened is that some people saw this as an opportunity to make Robin look bad, and use some of the words he said completely out of context, creating a narrative where he said something he definitely did not say, and that looked really bad.
And while I think the bar of “only write essays that don’t really inflame lots of people and cause them to be triggered” is already a high bar to meet, but maybe a potentially reasonable one, the bar of “never write anything that when taken out of context could cause people to be really triggered” is no longer a feasible bar to meet. Indeed it is a bar that is now so high that I no longer know how to make the vast majority of important intellectual points I have to make in order to solve many of the important global problems I want us to solve in my lifetime. The way I understood your comment above, and the usual critiques of that blogpost in particular, is that it was leaning into the out-of-context phrasings of his writing, without really acknowledging the context in which the phrase was used.
I think this is an important point to make, because on a number of occasions I do think Robin has actually said things that seemed much more edgy and unnecessarily inflammatory even if you had the full context of his writing, and I think the case for those being bad is much stronger than the case for that blogpost about “gentle, silent rape” and other things in its reference class being bad. I think Twitter in particular has made some of this a lot worse, since it’s much harder to provide much context that helps people comprehend the full argument, and it’s much more frequent for things to be taken out of context by others.
Sorry! I never meant to imply that you disagree with the point.
My comment in this case is more: How would you have actually wanted Robin Hanson to phrase his point? I’ve thought about that issue a good amount, and like, I feel like it’s just a really hard point to make. I am honestly curious what other thing you would have preferred Hanson to say instead. The thing he said seemed overall pretty clear to me, and really not like an attempt to be intentionally edge or something, and more that the point he wanted to make kind of just had a bunch of inconvenient consequences that were difficult to explore (similarly to how utilitarianism quickly gives rise to a number of hard to discuss consequences that are hard to explore).
My guess is you can probably come up with something better, but that it would take you substantial time (> 10 minutes) of thinking.
My argument here is mostly: In context, the thing that Robin said seemed fine, and I don’t expect that many people who read that blogpost actually found his phrasing that problematic. The thing that I expect to have happened is that some people saw this as an opportunity to make Robin look bad, and use some of the words he said completely out of context, creating a narrative where he said something he definitely did not say, and that looked really bad.
And while I think the bar of “only write essays that don’t really inflame lots of people and cause them to be triggered” is already a high bar to meet, but maybe a potentially reasonable one, the bar of “never write anything that when taken out of context could cause people to be really triggered” is no longer a feasible bar to meet. Indeed it is a bar that is now so high that I no longer know how to make the vast majority of important intellectual points I have to make in order to solve many of the important global problems I want us to solve in my lifetime. The way I understood your comment above, and the usual critiques of that blogpost in particular, is that it was leaning into the out-of-context phrasings of his writing, without really acknowledging the context in which the phrase was used.
I think this is an important point to make, because on a number of occasions I do think Robin has actually said things that seemed much more edgy and unnecessarily inflammatory even if you had the full context of his writing, and I think the case for those being bad is much stronger than the case for that blogpost about “gentle, silent rape” and other things in its reference class being bad. I think Twitter in particular has made some of this a lot worse, since it’s much harder to provide much context that helps people comprehend the full argument, and it’s much more frequent for things to be taken out of context by others.