One possible way to “fix” it in the sense of being better for WSCFriedman’s preferences, and I’m not saying this is necessarily a good idea because by excluding the current framing there might be information loss in conveying some other important aspects of EA: instead frame the blue bird/black bird dialogues as looking more like “intro to moral philosophy for children.”
In particular, an underlying narrative of “ethics is hard” might be appealing.
So instead of black bird having clearly right answers, we instead have both black bird and blue bird posit naively reasonable considerations and having a dialogue that address each point.
Eg, black bird posits that they should bring food to the other tree, blue bird talks about good reasons for partiality and the limits of morality, black bird says this is better from the point of view of the universe which is selfishly reasonable using one of Parfit’s arguments, blue bird says why local information (with some analogy to bird-Hayek) is an impartial reason for partiality, black bird says that the empirical situation should be clearer enough to exceed that general principle, and so forth.
I could be mistaken, but I feel as if that would completely change it into a different sort of thing. I admit it would be a thing that I-personally would probably like more, but I feel it would also remove all the power the story currently possesses. I feel as if this would be removing a thing from existence and replacing it with a new and different thing, instead of improving a thing—and this is clearly a popular thing, since it’s the second-highest-rated submission to the contest, so far.
I feel as if this would be removing a thing from existence and replacing it with a new and different thing, instead of improving a thing
Yeah I was imagining it as a different storyline rather than the same thing. I personally like Lizka’s story as-is, except for the convoluted lumberjack vs small tree metaphor.
One possible way to “fix” it in the sense of being better for WSCFriedman’s preferences, and I’m not saying this is necessarily a good idea because by excluding the current framing there might be information loss in conveying some other important aspects of EA: instead frame the blue bird/black bird dialogues as looking more like “intro to moral philosophy for children.”
In particular, an underlying narrative of “ethics is hard” might be appealing.
So instead of black bird having clearly right answers, we instead have both black bird and blue bird posit naively reasonable considerations and having a dialogue that address each point.
Eg, black bird posits that they should bring food to the other tree, blue bird talks about good reasons for partiality and the limits of morality, black bird says this is better from the point of view of the universe which is selfishly reasonable using one of Parfit’s arguments, blue bird says why local information (with some analogy to bird-Hayek) is an impartial reason for partiality, black bird says that the empirical situation should be clearer enough to exceed that general principle, and so forth.
I could be mistaken, but I feel as if that would completely change it into a different sort of thing. I admit it would be a thing that I-personally would probably like more, but I feel it would also remove all the power the story currently possesses. I feel as if this would be removing a thing from existence and replacing it with a new and different thing, instead of improving a thing—and this is clearly a popular thing, since it’s the second-highest-rated submission to the contest, so far.
Yeah I was imagining it as a different storyline rather than the same thing. I personally like Lizka’s story as-is, except for the convoluted lumberjack vs small tree metaphor.
I am commenting purely to let you know that one of the thumbs-up on your post is mine.
Wait there’s a more highly-rated submission?
Last I saw, “The Reset Button” was leading it by one vote.