The agent LessWrong is a big community of different people who are likely to come and go and change a lot over a 2-year timespan, so ‘you are inconsistent’ is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. (And not necessarily a criticism!)
Your previous post strikes me as fun and well-written, but thin. Good for a one-off joke, but I’d expect follow-ups to be more detailed, and to link back to old antecedents or background material. It’s not super surprising that a similar concept could fail if we don’t control for execution; and the concept you’re trying to teach here is a lot more obvious and widely acknowledged than the Using Presuppositions concept, so this has much lower VOI.
That’s a fair critique, if it is widely acknowledged. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before, thought. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Let’s present three alternatives, because we know what happens if you only present two.”
I mean that the polarizing effect of false dichotomies is pretty obvious. I should clarify that the part of your post that isn’t obvious, also doesn’t seem at all plausible to me, and isn’t defended, if part of the message is supposed to be that dualism is always to be avoided when possible. Frequently, it’s much better to present two options than three—it’s simpler, and any trilemma can in any case be converted into a disjunctive dilemma.
The agent LessWrong is a big community of different people who are likely to come and go and change a lot over a 2-year timespan, so ‘you are inconsistent’ is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. (And not necessarily a criticism!)
Your previous post strikes me as fun and well-written, but thin. Good for a one-off joke, but I’d expect follow-ups to be more detailed, and to link back to old antecedents or background material. It’s not super surprising that a similar concept could fail if we don’t control for execution; and the concept you’re trying to teach here is a lot more obvious and widely acknowledged than the Using Presuppositions concept, so this has much lower VOI.
That’s a fair critique, if it is widely acknowledged. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before, thought. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Let’s present three alternatives, because we know what happens if you only present two.”
I mean that the polarizing effect of false dichotomies is pretty obvious. I should clarify that the part of your post that isn’t obvious, also doesn’t seem at all plausible to me, and isn’t defended, if part of the message is supposed to be that dualism is always to be avoided when possible. Frequently, it’s much better to present two options than three—it’s simpler, and any trilemma can in any case be converted into a disjunctive dilemma.