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.
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.