The article has a heading of the form “X, if you don’t care about maximizing correctness” followed by a (correct) discussion showing that “X, if you don’t care exclusively about maximizing correctness”.
Those two things are very different. In particular, around here almost everybody cares about maximizing correctness, but I would guess that very few people care about literally nothing else.
That discussion also makes the decision to take “ad revenue”, something readers here may reasonably be expected to have some contempt for, as its working example of something other than correctness. I think this is part of the same rhetorical move: Zack acknowledges, formally, that it can be reasonable to care about things other than correctness (he also mentions, but decides not to use, the example of “total number of interesting ideas” which I would guess almost everyone here would agree is a thing worth wanting), but then he (1) chooses to instead emphasize something that most of us will feel icky about the idea of optimizing for[1] and (2) heads the section with a title that accuses people of not caring about correctness, which is extremely very utterly different from caring about other things besides correctness.
[1] Also something that, so far as I know, cannot possibly be a concern here on Less Wrong where there is no advertising revenue to try to maximize.
(I remark that this is not the first time I have had a discussion with Zack of much the same shape, where Zack implicitly or explicitly claims that epistemic virtue means caring only about one thing even when there seem (at least to me) to be other things a would-be clear thinker might reasonably care about. I think it might be the third or fourth time.)
[EDITED to add:] I realise that that last paragraph might be misleading; this is an instance of “me having a discussion with Zack” only in the sense that this comment here is by me and it’s replying to something Zack wrote. I don’t mean to imply that what Zack wrote had anything at all to do with me; it didn’t.
“Maximizing X”, in a vacuum, does indeed mean making X as large as possible while ignoring everything else. But we are not always in a vacuum. There is such a thing as “constrained optimization”; much of the time when someone refers to “maximizing X” it’s in a context like “maximizing X while satisfying constraint C”. There is such a thing as “multi-objective optimization” where you’re trying to maximize X and also trying to maximize Y and you have to trade them off somehow.
So even in the technical language of mathematics “maximizing X” need not imply ignoring everything except X.
And, of course, someone writing or commenting or moderating on an internet forum is not literally solving mathematical optimization problems, and if you talk about them “caring about maximizing X” then it would literally never occur to me to interpret that as “caring about maximizing X and literally about nothing else”.
… Having said which, I just polled a couple of other people of my acquaintance, both mathematicians and hence presumably more than averagely aware of the technical meaning of “maximizing”, and they both said that they would interpret “X doesn’t care about maximizing Y” as being consistent with X preferring Y to be bigger but also having other concerns.
I have therefore deleted the bit of this comment where I indignantly proclaim that I see no possible reason for writing the heading the way you did other than rhetorical sleight-of-hand :-), but it still seems to me that ”… if you care about other things besides correctness” would be very much less liable to mislead or misdirect readers than ”… if you don’t care about maximizing correctness”. (And I think the wording you ended up using at the end of the text of that section indicates that it’s more natural to phrase things that way.)
The article has a heading of the form “X, if you don’t care about maximizing correctness” followed by a (correct) discussion showing that “X, if you don’t care exclusively about maximizing correctness”.
Those two things are very different. In particular, around here almost everybody cares about maximizing correctness, but I would guess that very few people care about literally nothing else.
That discussion also makes the decision to take “ad revenue”, something readers here may reasonably be expected to have some contempt for, as its working example of something other than correctness. I think this is part of the same rhetorical move: Zack acknowledges, formally, that it can be reasonable to care about things other than correctness (he also mentions, but decides not to use, the example of “total number of interesting ideas” which I would guess almost everyone here would agree is a thing worth wanting), but then he (1) chooses to instead emphasize something that most of us will feel icky about the idea of optimizing for[1] and (2) heads the section with a title that accuses people of not caring about correctness, which is extremely very utterly different from caring about other things besides correctness.
[1] Also something that, so far as I know, cannot possibly be a concern here on Less Wrong where there is no advertising revenue to try to maximize.
(I remark that this is not the first time I have had a discussion with Zack of much the same shape, where Zack implicitly or explicitly claims that epistemic virtue means caring only about one thing even when there seem (at least to me) to be other things a would-be clear thinker might reasonably care about. I think it might be the third or fourth time.)
[EDITED to add:] I realise that that last paragraph might be misleading; this is an instance of “me having a discussion with Zack” only in the sense that this comment here is by me and it’s replying to something Zack wrote. I don’t mean to imply that what Zack wrote had anything at all to do with me; it didn’t.
That’s what “maximizing” means, though! The m-word in the section title was very deliberate.
“Maximizing X”, in a vacuum, does indeed mean making X as large as possible while ignoring everything else. But we are not always in a vacuum. There is such a thing as “constrained optimization”; much of the time when someone refers to “maximizing X” it’s in a context like “maximizing X while satisfying constraint C”. There is such a thing as “multi-objective optimization” where you’re trying to maximize X and also trying to maximize Y and you have to trade them off somehow.
So even in the technical language of mathematics “maximizing X” need not imply ignoring everything except X.
And, of course, someone writing or commenting or moderating on an internet forum is not literally solving mathematical optimization problems, and if you talk about them “caring about maximizing X” then it would literally never occur to me to interpret that as “caring about maximizing X and literally about nothing else”.
… Having said which, I just polled a couple of other people of my acquaintance, both mathematicians and hence presumably more than averagely aware of the technical meaning of “maximizing”, and they both said that they would interpret “X doesn’t care about maximizing Y” as being consistent with X preferring Y to be bigger but also having other concerns.
I have therefore deleted the bit of this comment where I indignantly proclaim that I see no possible reason for writing the heading the way you did other than rhetorical sleight-of-hand :-), but it still seems to me that ”… if you care about other things besides correctness” would be very much less liable to mislead or misdirect readers than ”… if you don’t care about maximizing correctness”. (And I think the wording you ended up using at the end of the text of that section indicates that it’s more natural to phrase things that way.)