This is a purposefully vague warning for reasons that should not need to be said. Unfortunately, this forces this post to discuss these issues at a higher level of generality than might be ideal, and so there is definitely merit to the claim that this post only deals in generalisations. For this reason, this post should be understood more as an outline of an argument than as an actual crystalized argument
I found this post unhelpful and this part of it particularly so. Your overall point—“don’t concede too much on important topics”—seems reasonable, but as I don’t know what topics you’re referring to, or what would count as ‘too much’ on those, I can’t learn anything.
More generally, I find EAs who post things of the flavour “we shouldn’t do X, but I can’t tell you what I mean by X for secret reasons” annoying, alienating and culty and wish people wouldn’t do it.
“Annoying, alienating and culty and wish people wouldn’t do it”—I would like to suggest that this is a bit of an overreaction given that this is just one post and almost no other posts on this forum are like this. It hardly seems like this forum is at risk of being overrun.
Anyway, I tried providing an example, though I still kept it away from directly discussing any concrete issues. Hopefully this makes the principle clearer, even if I haven’t directly explained how EA should apply this principle.
I found this post unhelpful and this part of it particularly so. Your overall point—“don’t concede too much on important topics”—seems reasonable, but as I don’t know what topics you’re referring to, or what would count as ‘too much’ on those, I can’t learn anything.
More generally, I find EAs who post things of the flavour “we shouldn’t do X, but I can’t tell you what I mean by X for secret reasons” annoying, alienating and culty and wish people wouldn’t do it.
“Annoying, alienating and culty and wish people wouldn’t do it”—I would like to suggest that this is a bit of an overreaction given that this is just one post and almost no other posts on this forum are like this. It hardly seems like this forum is at risk of being overrun.
Anyway, I tried providing an example, though I still kept it away from directly discussing any concrete issues. Hopefully this makes the principle clearer, even if I haven’t directly explained how EA should apply this principle.