The rest of the article is populated by sentence structures more typically found in continental philosophy works than on LessWrong, of which the most egregious is probably this one:
Thanks for expressing your frustration with the writing, but I’ll mostly ignore that because it’s a matter of style not substance. Writing this way is functional for my purposes: I mostly intend to express subtle, nuanced points, and more direct writing flattens away the important nuance that, when understood, avoids misunderstanding. But when the nuance is missed and taken to be the simple thing at the core, it’s more easily misunderstood. The other option is to write shorter, more ambiguous words that convey the same meaning via what we might call “poetry”. Neither solution is great. The alternative, though, is I think worse: very detailed mathematical models with so many moving parts they are hard to keep track of by our brains not designed for that task. All options are poor, so I go with the one I am most fluent in.
From my perspective, this style means that although I feel pretty sure that you made a relatively simple mistake somewhere, I am unable to explain it, because the text is just too hard to work with.
I’d say this style works fine for some purposes, but “finding the truth” isn’t one of them. (The same is probably true about the continental philosophy in general.)
My guess is that you use words “value drift” to mean many other things, such as “extrapolation of your values as you learn”, “changes in priorities”, etc.
My guess is that you use words “value drift” to mean many other things, such as “extrapolation of your values as you learn”, “changes in priorities”, etc.
I’m not sure this is my fault; I think other people use value drift to mean many things because it’s confused, i.e. people aren’t quite sure what they mean when they talk about it. Much of my goal is, if nothing else, to expose that confusion, and if you feel I used it to mean many things that I think I succeeded in causing you to see the same thing I see, even if you attribute the confusion to me alone rather than to everyone talking about this topic. My rhetoric was perhaps not quite careful enough to help you tell apart any unique confusion on my part from confusion created by a confused topic.
Thanks for expressing your frustration with the writing, but I’ll mostly ignore that because it’s a matter of style not substance. Writing this way is functional for my purposes: I mostly intend to express subtle, nuanced points, and more direct writing flattens away the important nuance that, when understood, avoids misunderstanding. But when the nuance is missed and taken to be the simple thing at the core, it’s more easily misunderstood. The other option is to write shorter, more ambiguous words that convey the same meaning via what we might call “poetry”. Neither solution is great. The alternative, though, is I think worse: very detailed mathematical models with so many moving parts they are hard to keep track of by our brains not designed for that task. All options are poor, so I go with the one I am most fluent in.
From my perspective, this style means that although I feel pretty sure that you made a relatively simple mistake somewhere, I am unable to explain it, because the text is just too hard to work with.
I’d say this style works fine for some purposes, but “finding the truth” isn’t one of them. (The same is probably true about the continental philosophy in general.)
My guess is that you use words “value drift” to mean many other things, such as “extrapolation of your values as you learn”, “changes in priorities”, etc.
I’m not sure this is my fault; I think other people use value drift to mean many things because it’s confused, i.e. people aren’t quite sure what they mean when they talk about it. Much of my goal is, if nothing else, to expose that confusion, and if you feel I used it to mean many things that I think I succeeded in causing you to see the same thing I see, even if you attribute the confusion to me alone rather than to everyone talking about this topic. My rhetoric was perhaps not quite careful enough to help you tell apart any unique confusion on my part from confusion created by a confused topic.