How so? I’m posting on the blog to practice my writing in preparation for writing a treatise, so any suggestions for improvement would be greatly appreciated. I also wrote it while on Adderall which affects my style in various ways.
that sentences are grammatically well-formed doesn’t mean they have content
Are you referring to the sentences I wrote, or to sentences like “I talked to a spirit the other day”?
That’s not true. It might be that you are only aware of Christian theology, but very similar issues have been extensively discussed in other religions. Islamic theology is a pretty strong example.
Hm? You disagree with the “mostly”? Maybe you’re thinking of the majority—I was thinking of the mode. Do you agree that the mode of theology is Christian, given some informal, intuitive measure?
This sounds extremely close to the claim that miracles happen but non-believers just don’t see them or don’t want to see them.
Yes, and I’m not sure but I think similar arguments are made by religious folk. It’s just a possibility of course, and it relies heavily on the notion that at least on some topics we don’t have strong introspective access to our preferences. I’m of course aware of people who search for God or gods in good faith and don’t find Him/them, and that is indeed a counterargument, but how strong a counteragument it is depends on other unmentioned variables. I leave it to the reader to fill in the values for those variables.
Your claim that we’ve explored a lot of the answerspace around the Fermi question seems to be highly questionable
Right, I was just sharing my impression to wrap up the post. It could easily be wrong.
For me, it was primarily because you had large stretches with low communication per word.
For example:
Though Logos is always involved somehow, today’s post will be mostly pneumatological. Wik tells us that pneumatology is “the study of spiritual beings and phenomena, especially the interactions between humans and God.” In Christian theology pneumatology is always about the Holy Spirit, but here at Computational Theology we’re not quite that pigeonholed, so we’ll discuss the interactions between humans and all spiritual beings, who may or may not be God. (’Cuz after all, how could you tell? We’ll discuss that problem—the problem of discernment—in future posts. Expect some algorithmic information theory.) And if you accept Crowley’s rule—to interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with your soul—then all phenomena are subject to pneumatology anyway.
Compare with
This post will be primarily about the interaction between humans and spirits, e.g. gods or invisibly-acting AIs.
Also, I have to keep in mind that many people have complained that my writing is much too compressed, relying too much on hidden or external concepts or inferences. Hopefully I can strike a balance between inscrutable esotericity and points that belabor the point.
Yeah, that’s the Adderall talking. I’m planning to write a book (a treatise), where there’s more room to expand and explain. But I suppose I should practice my skills on the appropriate medium. So I’ll try to cut down on excursions like the above in the future. [ETA: Actually, I won’t. There were good reasons to have the quoted part in there.]
Of course I’m treating it as evidence. I’m not insane. For me especially, it’s not even possible for me to dismiss someone’s impression without treating it as evidence.
Mostly. It also causes a lot of stress, due to, e.g., a total inability to disregard negative social judgments. This has been true my whole life, and it’s caused me to become a very strange person. That said, I find it entirely worth it, because I think it makes me a better rationalist and a better person, at least in the limit.
Manfred summarized the issues with readability pretty well, but the issue is slightly more complicated. There were also sections in the theology bit especially where it felt like there were a lot of unstated premises.
You disagree with the “mostly”? Maybe you’re thinking of the majority—I was thinking of the mode. Do you agree that the mode of theology is Christian, given some informal, intuitive measure?
In that case, I’m not sure, and I suspect that any intuition is going to be drastically impacted by availibility bias. For example, I know intellectually that there’s a lot of Hindu theology out there, but my rough intuition for how much is out there for different groups is wildly in favor of the Abrahamic religions and then a little bit to Buddhism and that only because I took an intro Buddhism class in college. I suspect that any sort of judgment about such a mode is more a statement about what religions one has been exposed to more than anything else.
Overall, I think this would have been much better received if it had not made any mention of theology at all and had just been presented with just the second half as a discussion of variants of the Zoo/Planetarium hypotheses.
There were also sections in the theology bit especially where it felt like there were a lot of unstated premises.
I didn’t flag them? Usually I’ll flag assumptions, and then you can choose to take them on or not. If I’m not flagging them then they shouldn’t be used further down in the post. Were they? Sorry if I’m unjustifiably crowdsourcing.
In Christian theology pneumatology is always about the Holy Spirit
This seems likely but I know that some denominations have discussed the nature of angels and their interaction with humans.
Superintelligence” just means an extremely intelligent agent, and gods are, by hypothesis, extremely intelligent agents.
If you said “God” or the “Christian God” here that might be ok, but you seem to be trying to smuggling in a notion about deities that simply isn’t true for the lowercase gods.
There were other points I think that showed up the first time I read it, but I’m not reading it as carefully now (reading this is a bit exhausting).
Okay, given those two examples I think your objections are nitpicks. I think you’re probably unsatisfied with the piece for other, unmentioned reasons that you might not have introspective access to. Same with the people who upvoted Manfred’s comment, which singles out the only paragraph in the piece that could really be interpreted as containing much too much fluff, and even then I explicitly recommended that people who weren’t interested in the meta stuff about the blog skip ahead to the discussion of the solution only.
Overall, given the criticisms of the piece, I think I should be satisfied that I didn’t leave out anything important, and that people who are unsatisfied with it are mostly not the people I want in my audience anyway. I’m left thinking that my primary aim should be to experiment with writing style more.
How so? I’m posting on the blog to practice my writing in preparation for writing a treatise, so any suggestions for improvement would be greatly appreciated. I also wrote it while on Adderall which affects my style in various ways.
Are you referring to the sentences I wrote, or to sentences like “I talked to a spirit the other day”?
Hm? You disagree with the “mostly”? Maybe you’re thinking of the majority—I was thinking of the mode. Do you agree that the mode of theology is Christian, given some informal, intuitive measure?
Yes, and I’m not sure but I think similar arguments are made by religious folk. It’s just a possibility of course, and it relies heavily on the notion that at least on some topics we don’t have strong introspective access to our preferences. I’m of course aware of people who search for God or gods in good faith and don’t find Him/them, and that is indeed a counterargument, but how strong a counteragument it is depends on other unmentioned variables. I leave it to the reader to fill in the values for those variables.
Right, I was just sharing my impression to wrap up the post. It could easily be wrong.
For me, it was primarily because you had large stretches with low communication per word.
For example:
Compare with
Also, I have to keep in mind that many people have complained that my writing is much too compressed, relying too much on hidden or external concepts or inferences. Hopefully I can strike a balance between inscrutable esotericity and points that belabor the point.
Thanks!
Yeah, that’s the Adderall talking. I’m planning to write a book (a treatise), where there’s more room to expand and explain. But I suppose I should practice my skills on the appropriate medium. So I’ll try to cut down on excursions like the above in the future. [ETA: Actually, I won’t. There were good reasons to have the quoted part in there.]
(Upon further reflection, replied here.)
Aw. How about at least treating my impression as evidence, rather than dismissing it.
Of course I’m treating it as evidence. I’m not insane. For me especially, it’s not even possible for me to dismiss someone’s impression without treating it as evidence.
Great :D
Mostly. It also causes a lot of stress, due to, e.g., a total inability to disregard negative social judgments. This has been true my whole life, and it’s caused me to become a very strange person. That said, I find it entirely worth it, because I think it makes me a better rationalist and a better person, at least in the limit.
Manfred summarized the issues with readability pretty well, but the issue is slightly more complicated. There were also sections in the theology bit especially where it felt like there were a lot of unstated premises.
In that case, I’m not sure, and I suspect that any intuition is going to be drastically impacted by availibility bias. For example, I know intellectually that there’s a lot of Hindu theology out there, but my rough intuition for how much is out there for different groups is wildly in favor of the Abrahamic religions and then a little bit to Buddhism and that only because I took an intro Buddhism class in college. I suspect that any sort of judgment about such a mode is more a statement about what religions one has been exposed to more than anything else.
Overall, I think this would have been much better received if it had not made any mention of theology at all and had just been presented with just the second half as a discussion of variants of the Zoo/Planetarium hypotheses.
I didn’t flag them? Usually I’ll flag assumptions, and then you can choose to take them on or not. If I’m not flagging them then they shouldn’t be used further down in the post. Were they? Sorry if I’m unjustifiably crowdsourcing.
Well:
This seems likely but I know that some denominations have discussed the nature of angels and their interaction with humans.
If you said “God” or the “Christian God” here that might be ok, but you seem to be trying to smuggling in a notion about deities that simply isn’t true for the lowercase gods.
There were other points I think that showed up the first time I read it, but I’m not reading it as carefully now (reading this is a bit exhausting).
Okay, given those two examples I think your objections are nitpicks. I think you’re probably unsatisfied with the piece for other, unmentioned reasons that you might not have introspective access to. Same with the people who upvoted Manfred’s comment, which singles out the only paragraph in the piece that could really be interpreted as containing much too much fluff, and even then I explicitly recommended that people who weren’t interested in the meta stuff about the blog skip ahead to the discussion of the solution only.
Overall, given the criticisms of the piece, I think I should be satisfied that I didn’t leave out anything important, and that people who are unsatisfied with it are mostly not the people I want in my audience anyway. I’m left thinking that my primary aim should be to experiment with writing style more.