I agree that it would have been better for Owen to at least briefly address that elephant early in the main text rather than noting in a comment that a brief discussion is planned for the second essay. I’m undecided on the broader question of whether it is advisable for him to be writing essays on “wholesomeness” at this point in time.
Thanks both. Yeah I kind of knew that writing on this topic was unusually likely to make people unhappy with me. But I’m still not certain what if anything I should have done differently. I don’t really want to not share thinking I think may be (nontrivially) helpful for some people just because it will make others unhappy with me (if there’s a deeper harm than “making people unhappy with me” which I’m not tracking, that might change my view). And I also don’t really want to make it about my issues, something I suspect that many people have spent more than enough time engaging with already (though I’m super happy to have peripheral conversation on that, it feels like putting it in the post proper would be an error by making it more about me than I think it should be).
I guess I’m leaning towards agreeing it would have been better to acknowledge the issue up-front, and posted a longer comment at the time of making the post talking a little about this, saying that of course people might reasonably have suspicion of my judgement on some of these topics, but for obvious reasons I’ve spent some time dwelling on them and wanting to share what I’ve got, etc.
BTW, as I’m alluding to there: it’s not total coincidence that this is a topic that I’ve been thinking about, since one of several generators for the thinking was “without fixing my mistaken beliefs, what kind of basic shift in orientation might nonetheless have helped me to avoid past errors”. I don’t think it’s a *majority* generator, and think e.g. SBF is a larger part. However, finding a frame which simultaneously seemed to give good answers to “how could things have been different to reduce issues with SBF” and also “how could I have oriented differently to reduce risk of harmful errors in the vicinity of attraction” provided some boost to my thinking that there was really something helpful and worth sharing.
I agree that it would have been better for Owen to at least briefly address that elephant early in the main text rather than noting in a comment that a brief discussion is planned for the second essay. I’m undecided on the broader question of whether it is advisable for him to be writing essays on “wholesomeness” at this point in time.
Thanks both. Yeah I kind of knew that writing on this topic was unusually likely to make people unhappy with me. But I’m still not certain what if anything I should have done differently. I don’t really want to not share thinking I think may be (nontrivially) helpful for some people just because it will make others unhappy with me (if there’s a deeper harm than “making people unhappy with me” which I’m not tracking, that might change my view). And I also don’t really want to make it about my issues, something I suspect that many people have spent more than enough time engaging with already (though I’m super happy to have peripheral conversation on that, it feels like putting it in the post proper would be an error by making it more about me than I think it should be).
I guess I’m leaning towards agreeing it would have been better to acknowledge the issue up-front, and posted a longer comment at the time of making the post talking a little about this, saying that of course people might reasonably have suspicion of my judgement on some of these topics, but for obvious reasons I’ve spent some time dwelling on them and wanting to share what I’ve got, etc.
BTW, as I’m alluding to there: it’s not total coincidence that this is a topic that I’ve been thinking about, since one of several generators for the thinking was “without fixing my mistaken beliefs, what kind of basic shift in orientation might nonetheless have helped me to avoid past errors”. I don’t think it’s a *majority* generator, and think e.g. SBF is a larger part. However, finding a frame which simultaneously seemed to give good answers to “how could things have been different to reduce issues with SBF” and also “how could I have oriented differently to reduce risk of harmful errors in the vicinity of attraction” provided some boost to my thinking that there was really something helpful and worth sharing.