Uhh… you do know LW is a blog, right? True, it’s a community blog, and true, its posts tend to be more formal and structured (like an article) than posts on most blogs, but nonetheless LW is a blog and it is perfectly all right for a post to be more blog-y, or personal, as long as it successfully communicates its point.
I should have been more specific. This reads like a personal blog post, intended to be read by people who know and care about the author personally — at least as acquaintances or blog-followers — who already trust the author’s judgments and consider themselves as having significant affinity or similarity to the author.
When read in the context of LW, it comes off poorly — as if the author assumes that his personal experiences are diagnostic of the human condition. Others have commented that it reads like a testimonial or sales-pitch; to me, in the LW context it reads more like an instance of the typical-mind fallacy. (Not that the two are necessarily all that distinct …)
While it seems to touch on a number of topics that have aroused interest in the past on LW, it’s not the sort of piece that I think is worth encouraging here.
As for the typical-mind fallacy, this usually isn’t a problem for me. I’m going to make a mistake now and then, but my models of the differences between people and what causes those differences are, if nothing else, highly tested and highly invested in. I haven’t only been working to understand myself.
As for including details of my personal experiences, the experiences of one person seem at least to be more relevant information for the reader than the experiences of no people.
While it seems to touch on a number of topics that have aroused interest in the past on LW, it’s not the sort of piece that I think is worth encouraging here.
This seems like a good reason to object to a post.
...and here is the “community curating” right now. If the article (or blog post, if you will) was successfully communicating its point, these comments would not be taking place. It is a useful article as is, but fewer unrelated personal life details would help keep it off of people’s tl;dr list.
I think of it like an inventor drawing a new device on a napkin—would his friend at the table be justified using that napkin to mop up his spilled pasta sauce? After all, it is just a napkin, and that’s what napkins are for.
The blog format is the napkin, and the articles are the drawings. Now that the drawings are on it, it’s no longer just a napkin.
Uhh… you do know LW is a blog, right? True, it’s a community blog, and true, its posts tend to be more formal and structured (like an article) than posts on most blogs, but nonetheless LW is a blog and it is perfectly all right for a post to be more blog-y, or personal, as long as it successfully communicates its point.
I should have been more specific. This reads like a personal blog post, intended to be read by people who know and care about the author personally — at least as acquaintances or blog-followers — who already trust the author’s judgments and consider themselves as having significant affinity or similarity to the author.
When read in the context of LW, it comes off poorly — as if the author assumes that his personal experiences are diagnostic of the human condition. Others have commented that it reads like a testimonial or sales-pitch; to me, in the LW context it reads more like an instance of the typical-mind fallacy. (Not that the two are necessarily all that distinct …)
While it seems to touch on a number of topics that have aroused interest in the past on LW, it’s not the sort of piece that I think is worth encouraging here.
As for the typical-mind fallacy, this usually isn’t a problem for me. I’m going to make a mistake now and then, but my models of the differences between people and what causes those differences are, if nothing else, highly tested and highly invested in. I haven’t only been working to understand myself.
As for including details of my personal experiences, the experiences of one person seem at least to be more relevant information for the reader than the experiences of no people.
This seems like a good reason to object to a post.
...and here is the “community curating” right now. If the article (or blog post, if you will) was successfully communicating its point, these comments would not be taking place. It is a useful article as is, but fewer unrelated personal life details would help keep it off of people’s tl;dr list.
I think of it like an inventor drawing a new device on a napkin—would his friend at the table be justified using that napkin to mop up his spilled pasta sauce? After all, it is just a napkin, and that’s what napkins are for. The blog format is the napkin, and the articles are the drawings. Now that the drawings are on it, it’s no longer just a napkin.