While it seems to me like you’re trying to protect an important pole of coherency and consistency here, I think this comment as well as some features of the OP (to a lesser extent) overstep some important bounds and make it quite tricky to have a productive conversation, in a way that I would like to both discourage and advise against. I worry that you’re imputing positions stronger than people are holding, and thus creating more disagreement than exists, and raising the emotional stakes of that disagreement more than seems necessary to continue the conversation.
I would rather not perpetuate an escalatory dynamic where you think you need to make a bigger and bigger fuss in order to get responses, in a way that can be reminiscent of ‘trapped priors’; it seems to me like the conversation in this thread could have been basically as effective at challenging So8res’s position and provoking elaboration with much less strain on your part, and yet when I imagine being in your shoes this encounter probably feels like an example of the success of this approach.
Concretely, in this case, I think you’re exasperated about humor and shitposting in a way that isn’t justified and is failing to credit the ways in which people are responding to your bids for increased seriousness and abstraction. The standard you seem to be imposing is not “please respond to seriousness with seriousness” but the much stronger “please never joke in public about something I take very seriously”, which seems like a pretty drastic standard, and one I would mildly warn against trying to enforce on LW.
(On the object level, I agree with Ben Pace that you are right that the about-face on this example deserves explanation, but my sense is that the explanation is satisfactory; the take that I’d summarize as ‘there’s a paraphyletic grouping that pretends to obviousness that it does not possess on closer examination’ seems sensible enough, tho I am interested in disagreements you have with that take.)
I applaud your earlier decision to have a friend review a draft before posting it, since I think this is the sort of behavior that leads to more intellectual progress and less mutual misunderstanding. In that spirit, I’d be happy to review any further comments you want to make in this conversation, in the hopes of having it go a bit better.
Some notes with my mod hat on:
While it seems to me like you’re trying to protect an important pole of coherency and consistency here, I think this comment as well as some features of the OP (to a lesser extent) overstep some important bounds and make it quite tricky to have a productive conversation, in a way that I would like to both discourage and advise against. I worry that you’re imputing positions stronger than people are holding, and thus creating more disagreement than exists, and raising the emotional stakes of that disagreement more than seems necessary to continue the conversation.
I would rather not perpetuate an escalatory dynamic where you think you need to make a bigger and bigger fuss in order to get responses, in a way that can be reminiscent of ‘trapped priors’; it seems to me like the conversation in this thread could have been basically as effective at challenging So8res’s position and provoking elaboration with much less strain on your part, and yet when I imagine being in your shoes this encounter probably feels like an example of the success of this approach.
Concretely, in this case, I think you’re exasperated about humor and shitposting in a way that isn’t justified and is failing to credit the ways in which people are responding to your bids for increased seriousness and abstraction. The standard you seem to be imposing is not “please respond to seriousness with seriousness” but the much stronger “please never joke in public about something I take very seriously”, which seems like a pretty drastic standard, and one I would mildly warn against trying to enforce on LW.
(On the object level, I agree with Ben Pace that you are right that the about-face on this example deserves explanation, but my sense is that the explanation is satisfactory; the take that I’d summarize as ‘there’s a paraphyletic grouping that pretends to obviousness that it does not possess on closer examination’ seems sensible enough, tho I am interested in disagreements you have with that take.)
I applaud your earlier decision to have a friend review a draft before posting it, since I think this is the sort of behavior that leads to more intellectual progress and less mutual misunderstanding. In that spirit, I’d be happy to review any further comments you want to make in this conversation, in the hopes of having it go a bit better.