I think the fundamental point here is an interesting one but I think that this post is unfortunately marred by using a lewd example that limits the potential audience—there are people who I would not be willing to share this post with as a result.
This is not a problem unique to you in particular—I think many of Eliezer’s posts have similar issues, Three Worlds Collide being perhaps the most well-known but there are also some that suffer from being too “sneery” towards religion or similar—but I thought it might be worth pointing out regardless.
I feel like the nature of the example was important for reasons which are intuitive and not fully transparent to me.
While it is a smidge extra work, feel free to copy-paste the text in an email to someone, replacing the exactly two instances of [phrase] with “outdoor Jacuzzis” or similar, if that’s useful to you.
I don’t want to reduce the audience of anything important unnecessarily, but this seems like a squashing of authorial style that is too strong, to me.
If I showed your comment to someone and asked them to guess what it was about, “the word ‘dildo’ appears 2 times in the text” is not what I think they’d guess.
I think the fundamental point here is an interesting one but I think that this post is unfortunately marred by using a lewd example that limits the potential audience—there are people who I would not be willing to share this post with as a result.
This is not a problem unique to you in particular—I think many of Eliezer’s posts have similar issues, Three Worlds Collide being perhaps the most well-known but there are also some that suffer from being too “sneery” towards religion or similar—but I thought it might be worth pointing out regardless.
I feel like the nature of the example was important for reasons which are intuitive and not fully transparent to me.
While it is a smidge extra work, feel free to copy-paste the text in an email to someone, replacing the exactly two instances of [phrase] with “outdoor Jacuzzis” or similar, if that’s useful to you.
I don’t want to reduce the audience of anything important unnecessarily, but this seems like a squashing of authorial style that is too strong, to me.
If I showed your comment to someone and asked them to guess what it was about, “the word ‘dildo’ appears 2 times in the text” is not what I think they’d guess.