Thanks Alex. In general I agree with you, if viewpoints are expressed that are outside of what most EAs think, they do sometimes get strawmanned and voted down without good reason (like you say ideas like handing more power to governments and post-growth concepts). In this case though I think the original poster was fairly aggressive with rhetorical tricks, as a pretty large part of making their argument—so I think Daniel’s criticism was reasonable.
thanks for your reply. I didn’t mean to say that Daniel didn’t have a point. It’s a reasonable argument to make. I just wanted to highlight that this shouldn’t be the only angle to look at such posts. If you look, his comment is by far the most upvoted and it only addresses a point tangential to the problem at hand. Of course, getting upvoted is not his „fault“. I just felt compelled to highlight that overly focusing on this kind of angle only brings us so far.
Thanks Alex. In general I agree with you, if viewpoints are expressed that are outside of what most EAs think, they do sometimes get strawmanned and voted down without good reason (like you say ideas like handing more power to governments and post-growth concepts). In this case though I think the original poster was fairly aggressive with rhetorical tricks, as a pretty large part of making their argument—so I think Daniel’s criticism was reasonable.
Hey Nick,
thanks for your reply. I didn’t mean to say that Daniel didn’t have a point. It’s a reasonable argument to make. I just wanted to highlight that this shouldn’t be the only angle to look at such posts. If you look, his comment is by far the most upvoted and it only addresses a point tangential to the problem at hand. Of course, getting upvoted is not his „fault“. I just felt compelled to highlight that overly focusing on this kind of angle only brings us so far.
Hope that makes it clearer :)