(I also felt that the applause lights argument largely didn’t hold up and came across as unnecessarily dismissive, I think the comment would have held up better without it)
I mostly wanted to point out a few characteristics of applause lights that I thought matched:
the proposed actions are easier to cheer for on a superficial level
arguing for the opposite is difficult, even if it might be correct: “Avoid coming across as dogmatic, elitist, or out-of-touch.” inverts to “be okay with coming across as dogmatic, elitsit, or out-of-touch”
when you try to put them into practice, the easy changes you can make don’t address fundamental difficulties, and making sweeping changes has high cost
Looking over it again, saying they are applause lights is saying that the recommendations are entirely vacuous, which is a pretty serious claim I didn’t mean to make.
Thanks Thomas! I definitely agree that when you get into the details of some of these they’re certainly not easy and that the framing of some of them could be seen as applause lights.
(I also felt that the applause lights argument largely didn’t hold up and came across as unnecessarily dismissive, I think the comment would have held up better without it)
Thanks, I made an edit to weaken the wording.
I mostly wanted to point out a few characteristics of applause lights that I thought matched:
the proposed actions are easier to cheer for on a superficial level
arguing for the opposite is difficult, even if it might be correct: “Avoid coming across as dogmatic, elitist, or out-of-touch.” inverts to “be okay with coming across as dogmatic, elitsit, or out-of-touch”
when you try to put them into practice, the easy changes you can make don’t address fundamental difficulties, and making sweeping changes has high cost
Looking over it again, saying they are applause lights is saying that the recommendations are entirely vacuous, which is a pretty serious claim I didn’t mean to make.
Thanks Thomas! I definitely agree that when you get into the details of some of these they’re certainly not easy and that the framing of some of them could be seen as applause lights.