Promoted to featured. Here is some background on the decision:
I’ve went back and forth on whether to promote this post to featured about 4-5 times and think this was a really hard call.
There are a bunch of things this post does really well:
Thrasymachus clearly put a lot of solid effort into this post, and also put a lot of effort into structuring it to help people understand its contents
It discusses actually important topics, and participates in an important conversation and comes at an opportune time
The post makes a set of really good points, and most importantly, tries to construct a rigorous framework in which to evaluate a set of alternatives, which I think is a really important thing to encourage
But there were also a bunch of things that made me hesitant. And since I think those are a bit harder to explain, this list will be longer, which does not mean it outweighs the good things I listed above (which should be evident from my decision to promote it after all).
I felt like this post was trying to convince me of something, instead of causing me to understand something.
I think this is my biggest issue with the post. After I finished reading it, I had a weak feeling that I understood a part of the world better than I had before, but this was not the dominant experience. The dominant experience was that I felt a bit more convinced to be on the side of the author in a public dispute.
I think one of the most valuable aspects of a lot of the best writing on LessWrong is that it tries to take a primarily educational framing, instead of an argumentative framing. The best posts on LessWrong help the reader understand some aspect of the world they weren’t able to understand before, and then point out implications of that understanding.
This post is filled with arguments that seem solid, but (to me) do not feel like they are designed to help me learn the intuitions of the author. After reading this article I had the internal experience of saying “It does seem difficult to construct counterarguments to this, so I guess I have some duty of coming to support the policy changes it requests” where I would have much more preferred the experience of “Ah, I understand why the author is writing this post, and I realize how this lens helps me see reality in a way that makes these policies seem effective”.
And this is something that I am very hesitant to promote. I am very worried about discourse on LessWrong going the way of public debates, in which arguments are soldiers, and in which the writing is optimized to be compelling without furthering understanding. Promoting this post feels a bit like going down that path.
The post was long and required significant investment to properly digest
I want to be very clear that a post being long and complex is not on its own a good reason for it not being promoted to featured. But, it makes sense to optimize the featured section of the page, which is designed to represent the common knowledge of the community, for the ratio of complexity/time-investment to value. And so a post that takes twice as long to process as another post with the same aggregate value of insights, is in some sense half as valuable in total.
As such, the length was definitely a major consideration, and I would have immediately promoted any post with the same insights and half the length.
-----
Overall, I was hesitant to trust my gut judgement here too much, since I do also strongly object to the aesthetics and philosophy that I see being proposed in this post, and I was worried that I was falling prey to rationalizing why I didn’t like the post, because I didn’t agree with what it argued for. But after thinking about it for a long time, I think I am now reasonably confident that promiting this post is the correct choice, especially after I spell out my worries explicitly.
Thank you a lot for writing this Thrasymachus and I hope to see more posts of yours on here.
+1; I mentioned before that I hoped this would get featured, and I’m happy that was the final decision. I also encouraged Thrasymachus to post this here and to the EA Forum, because the timing works out so well. My only source of hesitation was that I don’t want people to assume that when Eliezer talks about “modest epistemology” in Inadequate Equilibria, he’s just talking about Thrasymachus’ strong version of modesty.
Thrasymachus’ post above feels a lot like a sequence to me: there are many different parts to it, and while there are central threads running through the post, in practice I expect to mostly want to cite this or that part. And there are parts I strongly agree with or find useful, even though I strongly disagree with other parts and would often frame things differently.
In terms of length, I think it could be valuable for someone in the comment section to attempt a short section-by-section summary. This is good general practice not only for conveying more of the gist to time-constrained readers, but also for giving Thrasymachus an opportunity to correct the summary if it turns out that his arguments have been misunderstood in some way.
Promoted to featured. Here is some background on the decision:
I’ve went back and forth on whether to promote this post to featured about 4-5 times and think this was a really hard call.
There are a bunch of things this post does really well:
Thrasymachus clearly put a lot of solid effort into this post, and also put a lot of effort into structuring it to help people understand its contents
It discusses actually important topics, and participates in an important conversation and comes at an opportune time
The post makes a set of really good points, and most importantly, tries to construct a rigorous framework in which to evaluate a set of alternatives, which I think is a really important thing to encourage
But there were also a bunch of things that made me hesitant. And since I think those are a bit harder to explain, this list will be longer, which does not mean it outweighs the good things I listed above (which should be evident from my decision to promote it after all).
I felt like this post was trying to convince me of something, instead of causing me to understand something.
I think this is my biggest issue with the post. After I finished reading it, I had a weak feeling that I understood a part of the world better than I had before, but this was not the dominant experience. The dominant experience was that I felt a bit more convinced to be on the side of the author in a public dispute.
I think one of the most valuable aspects of a lot of the best writing on LessWrong is that it tries to take a primarily educational framing, instead of an argumentative framing. The best posts on LessWrong help the reader understand some aspect of the world they weren’t able to understand before, and then point out implications of that understanding.
This post is filled with arguments that seem solid, but (to me) do not feel like they are designed to help me learn the intuitions of the author. After reading this article I had the internal experience of saying “It does seem difficult to construct counterarguments to this, so I guess I have some duty of coming to support the policy changes it requests” where I would have much more preferred the experience of “Ah, I understand why the author is writing this post, and I realize how this lens helps me see reality in a way that makes these policies seem effective”.
And this is something that I am very hesitant to promote. I am very worried about discourse on LessWrong going the way of public debates, in which arguments are soldiers, and in which the writing is optimized to be compelling without furthering understanding. Promoting this post feels a bit like going down that path.
The post was long and required significant investment to properly digest
I want to be very clear that a post being long and complex is not on its own a good reason for it not being promoted to featured. But, it makes sense to optimize the featured section of the page, which is designed to represent the common knowledge of the community, for the ratio of complexity/time-investment to value. And so a post that takes twice as long to process as another post with the same aggregate value of insights, is in some sense half as valuable in total.
As such, the length was definitely a major consideration, and I would have immediately promoted any post with the same insights and half the length.
-----
Overall, I was hesitant to trust my gut judgement here too much, since I do also strongly object to the aesthetics and philosophy that I see being proposed in this post, and I was worried that I was falling prey to rationalizing why I didn’t like the post, because I didn’t agree with what it argued for. But after thinking about it for a long time, I think I am now reasonably confident that promiting this post is the correct choice, especially after I spell out my worries explicitly.
Thank you a lot for writing this Thrasymachus and I hope to see more posts of yours on here.
+1; I mentioned before that I hoped this would get featured, and I’m happy that was the final decision. I also encouraged Thrasymachus to post this here and to the EA Forum, because the timing works out so well. My only source of hesitation was that I don’t want people to assume that when Eliezer talks about “modest epistemology” in Inadequate Equilibria, he’s just talking about Thrasymachus’ strong version of modesty.
Thrasymachus’ post above feels a lot like a sequence to me: there are many different parts to it, and while there are central threads running through the post, in practice I expect to mostly want to cite this or that part. And there are parts I strongly agree with or find useful, even though I strongly disagree with other parts and would often frame things differently.
In terms of length, I think it could be valuable for someone in the comment section to attempt a short section-by-section summary. This is good general practice not only for conveying more of the gist to time-constrained readers, but also for giving Thrasymachus an opportunity to correct the summary if it turns out that his arguments have been misunderstood in some way.