The post claims that saying things like should, good or bad, (or other words that carry moral judgement) can often lead to bad reasoning because you fail to anticipate the actual consequences. (I recommend reading this post, or at least the last two sections, the sentence here isn’t really a good summary.)
Actually, some replacements suggested in this post may not help in some cases:
Someone in the EA community should do a specific thing [...]
More people in the EA community should do a specific thing [...]
EA would be better if it had a certain property [...]
An issue is underemphasized by many people in the community, or by large EA institutions [...]
The problem isn’t that those words are always bad, but that you need to say more specifically why they are bad, or you might miss something. Therefore those sentences should be followed with a “because” or “otherwise” or preceded with a reason, like in this very sentence.
Of course, in some truly obvious cases it is ok to just use “good” or “bad” or synonyms without a more explicit reason, but those words should be warning signs, so you can see if you didn’t reason well.
(Have you noticed how often I used good, bad or should in this comment, and what the fundamental reasons were that I didn’t bother justifying and just accepted as good or bad?) (Also, replacing “good” with something like “useful” or other synonyms doesn’t help, they should still be warning signs.)
Related to the post and very related to this comment is this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M8cEyKmpcbYzC2Lv5/exercise-taboo-should
The post claims that saying things like should, good or bad, (or other words that carry moral judgement) can often lead to bad reasoning because you fail to anticipate the actual consequences. (I recommend reading this post, or at least the last two sections, the sentence here isn’t really a good summary.)
Actually, some replacements suggested in this post may not help in some cases:
The problem isn’t that those words are always bad, but that you need to say more specifically why they are bad, or you might miss something. Therefore those sentences should be followed with a “because” or “otherwise” or preceded with a reason, like in this very sentence.
Of course, in some truly obvious cases it is ok to just use “good” or “bad” or synonyms without a more explicit reason, but those words should be warning signs, so you can see if you didn’t reason well.
(Have you noticed how often I used good, bad or should in this comment, and what the fundamental reasons were that I didn’t bother justifying and just accepted as good or bad?) (Also, replacing “good” with something like “useful” or other synonyms doesn’t help, they should still be warning signs.)