Meta: it may be surprising this post received so many downvotes. It is making a contribution to an important topic. I’m not sure how useful the contribution is (other comments raise several issues), but we usually don’t want to put people off offering ideas that may have flaws.
I guess that what led to the downvotes is tone: there seems to be a high level of confidence in the idea, which is not adequately justified while also running contrary to default opinion.
Good point to raise Owen! I strongly agree that we don’t want to put people off contributing ideas that might run against default opinion or have flaws—these kinds of ideas are definitely really useful. And I think there were points in this post that did contribute something useful—I hadn’t thought before about whether a subjectivist should take into account moral uncertainty, and that strikes me as an interesting question. I didn’t downvote the post for this reason—it’s certainly relevant and it prompted me to think about some useful things—although I was initially very tempted to, because it did strike me as unreasonably overconfident.
This kind of thing is hard. I wholly approve of you stating your own views, and wouldn’t want to discourage posting things like this.
I’d guess that just changing the framing slightly (e.g. saying “These are my current thoughts:” at the start and “What do you think?” at the end) or adding in a couple more caveats would have been enough to avoid the negative reaction.
I hope you end up taking this response as useful feedback, and not a negative experience!
Meta: it may be surprising this post received so many downvotes. It is making a contribution to an important topic. I’m not sure how useful the contribution is (other comments raise several issues), but we usually don’t want to put people off offering ideas that may have flaws.
I guess that what led to the downvotes is tone: there seems to be a high level of confidence in the idea, which is not adequately justified while also running contrary to default opinion.
Good point to raise Owen! I strongly agree that we don’t want to put people off contributing ideas that might run against default opinion or have flaws—these kinds of ideas are definitely really useful. And I think there were points in this post that did contribute something useful—I hadn’t thought before about whether a subjectivist should take into account moral uncertainty, and that strikes me as an interesting question. I didn’t downvote the post for this reason—it’s certainly relevant and it prompted me to think about some useful things—although I was initially very tempted to, because it did strike me as unreasonably overconfident.
I didn’t mean to appear overconfident. I just meant to state my own views on the topic.
I’ll avoid posting (things like this) in the future. I’m sorry :(
This kind of thing is hard. I wholly approve of you stating your own views, and wouldn’t want to discourage posting things like this.
I’d guess that just changing the framing slightly (e.g. saying “These are my current thoughts:” at the start and “What do you think?” at the end) or adding in a couple more caveats would have been enough to avoid the negative reaction.
I hope you end up taking this response as useful feedback, and not a negative experience!