Some “first impressions” feedback: though it has a long tradition in geekdom, and occasionally works well, I for one find the fake-FAQ format extremely offputting. These aren’t “frequently” asked questions—they are your questions, and not so much questions as lead-ins to various parts of an essay.
I’d be more interested if you started off with a concise definition of what you mean by “consequentialism”. (If you were truly writing a FAQ, that would be the most frequently asked question of all). As it is, the essay starts losing me by the time it gets to “part one”—I skipped ahead to see how long I should expect to spend on preliminaries before getting to the heart of the matter.
(Usually, when you feel obliged to make a self-deprecating excuse such as “Sorry, I fell asleep several pages back” in your own writing, there’s a structure issue that you want to correct urgently.)
Myself, I found the fake-FAQ format to work pretty well, since it’s a relatively faithful recreation of Internet debates on morality/politics/whatever.
I think the fake-FAQ format is good when you can use it to skip to the interesting things. I wouldn’t read an essay but if I could just read two answers that interest me, I might read the rest too. This being said, in the Cons-FAQ a lot of questions refer to previous questions which of course completely destroys this advantage.
Fake-FAQs can be a method of misrepresenting arguments against your viewpoint. Like: “Check out all these silly arguments anti-consequentialists frequently use”. Just an example, I’m not saying Yvain is doing this.
Some “first impressions” feedback: though it has a long tradition in geekdom, and occasionally works well, I for one find the fake-FAQ format extremely offputting. These aren’t “frequently” asked questions—they are your questions, and not so much questions as lead-ins to various parts of an essay.
I’d be more interested if you started off with a concise definition of what you mean by “consequentialism”. (If you were truly writing a FAQ, that would be the most frequently asked question of all). As it is, the essay starts losing me by the time it gets to “part one”—I skipped ahead to see how long I should expect to spend on preliminaries before getting to the heart of the matter.
(Usually, when you feel obliged to make a self-deprecating excuse such as “Sorry, I fell asleep several pages back” in your own writing, there’s a structure issue that you want to correct urgently.)
Myself, I found the fake-FAQ format to work pretty well, since it’s a relatively faithful recreation of Internet debates on morality/politics/whatever.
I think the fake-FAQ format is good when you can use it to skip to the interesting things. I wouldn’t read an essay but if I could just read two answers that interest me, I might read the rest too. This being said, in the Cons-FAQ a lot of questions refer to previous questions which of course completely destroys this advantage.
Fake-FAQs can be a method of misrepresenting arguments against your viewpoint. Like: “Check out all these silly arguments anti-consequentialists frequently use”. Just an example, I’m not saying Yvain is doing this.
I don’t care whether it’s in the format of a FAQ, but don’t call it a FAQ if the questions are not frequently asked.
I’ve long had the suspicion that many FAQs aren’t really frequently asked.
I have only read his anti-libertarian FAQ but the concerns mentioned in the questions did seem to be typical of those that would be asked.