Maybe this wasn’t your intent, but the title is a bit ambiguous about the word “inspire”—it seems as though you might be advocating for actions that inspire disasters, as opposed to making the case for allowing disasters that are themselves inspiring.
Thanks for the observation. The idea was definitely not to say that promoting disasters is a pragmatic course of action, bur rather that disasters which inspire us to prevent future risks can be good. I hope that the first line of the post would clear up any potential confusion.
I’m pretty averse to making major changes to a post, but for the sake of preventing possible future confusion, I opted to change ‘Inspiring’ to ‘Inspirational’ in the title.
[Update: in response to some additional feedback, another update was made. See the first line of the post.]
I think the word “inspirational” isn’t ideal either, and in fact not very different from “inspiring”. And I think the title matters massively for the interpretation of an article. So I think you haven’t appropriately addressed David’s legitimate point. I wouldn’t use “inspiring”, “inspirational”, or similar words.
I agree that “inspirational” is still not optimal because of its positive connotation, but I think it is fair to say that stecas was trying to improve it and that the update successfully removed the possibility of understanding the title as a call to action (old title was something like “Cause Prioritization by Inspiring Disasters”, where “Inspiring” was meant as an adjective, but could be understood as a gerund).
Some ideas:
“A model of how preventing enduring catastrophes could backfire”
“Would a Utilitarian go back in time and prevent a cautionary catastrophe?”
“Cause Prioritizaion in light of cautionary disasters”
Maybe this wasn’t your intent, but the title is a bit ambiguous about the word “inspire”—it seems as though you might be advocating for actions that inspire disasters, as opposed to making the case for allowing disasters that are themselves inspiring.
Thanks for the observation. The idea was definitely not to say that promoting disasters is a pragmatic course of action, bur rather that disasters which inspire us to prevent future risks can be good. I hope that the first line of the post would clear up any potential confusion.
I’m pretty averse to making major changes to a post, but for the sake of preventing possible future confusion, I opted to change ‘Inspiring’ to ‘Inspirational’ in the title.
[Update: in response to some additional feedback, another update was made. See the first line of the post.]
I think the word “inspirational” isn’t ideal either, and in fact not very different from “inspiring”. And I think the title matters massively for the interpretation of an article. So I think you haven’t appropriately addressed David’s legitimate point. I wouldn’t use “inspiring”, “inspirational”, or similar words.
I agree that “inspirational” is still not optimal because of its positive connotation, but I think it is fair to say that stecas was trying to improve it and that the update successfully removed the possibility of understanding the title as a call to action (old title was something like “Cause Prioritization by Inspiring Disasters”, where “Inspiring” was meant as an adjective, but could be understood as a gerund).
Some ideas:
“A model of how preventing enduring catastrophes could backfire”
“Would a Utilitarian go back in time and prevent a cautionary catastrophe?”
“Cause Prioritizaion in light of cautionary disasters”