“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.)
“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.)