I find it hard to tell what you see as good or bad, among these things, especially around what currently is, vs what you would see in the world. I of course can read what you’ve explicitly stated as good, but the way you’ve written this puts it nearby in linguistic vector space to things which are controversial at best, but are intertwined with processes that I would expect to cause seriously bad things. I would appreciate if you could find a way to more clearly signal what outcomes you are inclined towards, to the degree that avoiding accidental pessimization permits you to do so, separate from how to get there. Because as is, it looks to me like you’re seeing the world through a … very strange lens, one that sees real problems but magnifies and distorts them in ways I find unfamiliar and confusing, and which from my understanding seems to blur things together; and I am unclear whether we have common ground, whether the things I see as good in the world are things you see as good, whether things I see as major evils of society are things you do. You’ve explicitly said that some things which attempt to do things in the world under banners of things one might think are good have instead done ill, and things that one might think do ill can be good.
In your talk I didn’t have an opportunity to properly probe your models, but it seemed to me that your label of evil was, at a minimum, not the core etiology of evil, and I worry that if what you seek as good really is simply the other quadrant, that you’re making a subtle mistake.
If you can look at what you wrote, and why I would write this, I think you will see that you have already described part of my reaction partially; but I think you have misunderstood my reaction, and I don’t feel that it is correct for me to fully clarify unless you can take a step of clarifying what it is you seek… virtues, I suppose, but I would want to know what those are.
I hope you can forgive my intentional vagueness.
edit: hash of the things I didn’t say: 0f4b9808113c6b10011fa485cd2176bba860c5e5008935a48c78722e9251c895 - will not edit this again
I find it hard to tell what you see as good or bad, among these things, especially around what currently is, vs what you would see in the world. I of course can read what you’ve explicitly stated as good, but the way you’ve written this puts it nearby in linguistic vector space to things which are controversial at best, but are intertwined with processes that I would expect to cause seriously bad things. I would appreciate if you could find a way to more clearly signal what outcomes you are inclined towards, to the degree that avoiding accidental pessimization permits you to do so, separate from how to get there. Because as is, it looks to me like you’re seeing the world through a … very strange lens, one that sees real problems but magnifies and distorts them in ways I find unfamiliar and confusing, and which from my understanding seems to blur things together; and I am unclear whether we have common ground, whether the things I see as good in the world are things you see as good, whether things I see as major evils of society are things you do. You’ve explicitly said that some things which attempt to do things in the world under banners of things one might think are good have instead done ill, and things that one might think do ill can be good.
In your talk I didn’t have an opportunity to properly probe your models, but it seemed to me that your label of evil was, at a minimum, not the core etiology of evil, and I worry that if what you seek as good really is simply the other quadrant, that you’re making a subtle mistake.
If you can look at what you wrote, and why I would write this, I think you will see that you have already described part of my reaction partially; but I think you have misunderstood my reaction, and I don’t feel that it is correct for me to fully clarify unless you can take a step of clarifying what it is you seek… virtues, I suppose, but I would want to know what those are.
I hope you can forgive my intentional vagueness.
edit: hash of the things I didn’t say: 0f4b9808113c6b10011fa485cd2176bba860c5e5008935a48c78722e9251c895 - will not edit this again