Sorry, those two weren’t the only answers I imagined you might give, I just didn’t want to make the comment longer before letting you respond.
My next guess was going to be that your objection was stylistic — that Zvi was using a lot of hyperbole and heated rhetoric that’s a poor fit for curated LW content, even if a more boring and neutral version of the same core claims would be fine.
I think that’s part of what’s going on (in terms of why the two of us disagree). I think another part of what’s going on is that I feel like I have good context for ~all the high-level generalizations and institutional criticisms Zvi is bringing in, and why one might hold such views, from reading previous Zvi-posts, reading lots of discussion of COVID-19 over the last few months, and generally being exposed to lots of rationalist and tech-contrarian-libertarian arguments over the years, such that it doesn’t feel super confusing or novel as a package and I can focus more on particular parts I found interesting and novel. (Like critiques of particular organizations, or new lenses I can try out and see whether it causes a different set of actions and beliefs to feel reasonable/‘natural’, and if so whether those actions and beliefs seem good.)
This isn’t to say that Zvi’s necessarily right on all counts and you’re wrong, and I think a discussion like this is exactly the way to properly bridge different people’s contexts and priors about the world. And given the mix of ‘this seems super wrong’ and ‘the style seems bad’ and ‘there aren’t even hyperlinks I can use to figure out what Zvi means or where he’s coming from’, I get why you’d think this isn’t curation-worthy content. I don’t want to go down all the object-level discussion paths necessarily to reach consensus about this myself, though if someone else wants to, I’ll be happy about that.
Sorry, those two weren’t the only answers I imagined you might give, I just didn’t want to make the comment longer before letting you respond.
My next guess was going to be that your objection was stylistic — that Zvi was using a lot of hyperbole and heated rhetoric that’s a poor fit for curated LW content, even if a more boring and neutral version of the same core claims would be fine.
I think that’s part of what’s going on (in terms of why the two of us disagree). I think another part of what’s going on is that I feel like I have good context for ~all the high-level generalizations and institutional criticisms Zvi is bringing in, and why one might hold such views, from reading previous Zvi-posts, reading lots of discussion of COVID-19 over the last few months, and generally being exposed to lots of rationalist and tech-contrarian-libertarian arguments over the years, such that it doesn’t feel super confusing or novel as a package and I can focus more on particular parts I found interesting and novel. (Like critiques of particular organizations, or new lenses I can try out and see whether it causes a different set of actions and beliefs to feel reasonable/‘natural’, and if so whether those actions and beliefs seem good.)
This isn’t to say that Zvi’s necessarily right on all counts and you’re wrong, and I think a discussion like this is exactly the way to properly bridge different people’s contexts and priors about the world. And given the mix of ‘this seems super wrong’ and ‘the style seems bad’ and ‘there aren’t even hyperlinks I can use to figure out what Zvi means or where he’s coming from’, I get why you’d think this isn’t curation-worthy content. I don’t want to go down all the object-level discussion paths necessarily to reach consensus about this myself, though if someone else wants to, I’ll be happy about that.