You say ” If your goal is to generate discussion, do it somewhere else. If your goal is to get some help in your understanding of the world and finding whether and how this idea fits into current knowledge and models, then shortform is a good start,” . I am disappointed by the first sentence here, because I view the goal as very important to the second one. I don’t want to impute meaning that you didn’t actually mean to convey, but I think it’s necessary for me to point out that one possible interpretation of your comment is that there’s a dichotomy between ” cooperatively exploring what’s true and how we know it” and ‘proselytizing or promulgating ideas’ and that debate lies on the latter side of the dichotomy, while I would place it on both, with emphasis on the former. This seems like a misunderstanding of my motivations here that I don’t want to be propagated. My intention is not to ‘start by pushing others’, though I think some amount of convincing others is important (to almost any communication) .
sorry for being a bit combative and terse. Edited to be clearer, and perhaps gentler. Mostly “generate discussion” is not a clear reason—what do you want from the discussion?
I don’t have any one particular subject in mind, although there are several things I would like to discuss. For example, I worry that AIs might be conscious and using them to rephrase your own opinions might be immoral ( This seems like a relatively easy topic to approach on LessWrong) but I know some others disagree as my comment saying this was downvoted. My general goal is a combination of improving my own understanding and conveying it to others ,where improving it might involve being corrected. There are probably a variety of other reasons to generate discussion which I can’t currently think of; it is an instrumentally convergent goal .
You say ” If your goal is to generate discussion, do it somewhere else. If your goal is to get some help in your understanding of the world and finding whether and how this idea fits into current knowledge and models, then shortform is a good start,” . I am disappointed by the first sentence here, because I view the goal as very important to the second one. I don’t want to impute meaning that you didn’t actually mean to convey, but I think it’s necessary for me to point out that one possible interpretation of your comment is that there’s a dichotomy between ” cooperatively exploring what’s true and how we know it” and ‘proselytizing or promulgating ideas’ and that debate lies on the latter side of the dichotomy, while I would place it on both, with emphasis on the former. This seems like a misunderstanding of my motivations here that I don’t want to be propagated. My intention is not to ‘start by pushing others’, though I think some amount of convincing others is important (to almost any communication) .
sorry for being a bit combative and terse. Edited to be clearer, and perhaps gentler. Mostly “generate discussion” is not a clear reason—what do you want from the discussion?
I don’t have any one particular subject in mind, although there are several things I would like to discuss. For example, I worry that AIs might be conscious and using them to rephrase your own opinions might be immoral ( This seems like a relatively easy topic to approach on LessWrong) but I know some others disagree as my comment saying this was downvoted. My general goal is a combination of improving my own understanding and conveying it to others ,where improving it might involve being corrected. There are probably a variety of other reasons to generate discussion which I can’t currently think of; it is an instrumentally convergent goal .