I have no power to decide what’s on the frontpage, but I’m glad these posts aren’t there because they make general points in a way that read to me as continuations of meta-discussions about the site and use examples from those discussions not so much as examples (because you could have easily made up more relatable examples, and the examples you chose are not salient to more than maybe a hundred people) but what seems to me to be a a way to make points against what’s happening in those conversations. This feature makes these posts feel like thinly-veiled drama posting to me.
To be fair, I don’t know your actual motivations, so this is just based on the vibe I’m getting reading them, but I think the vibe I (and others?) pick up reading a post is pretty important for what should be on the frontpage.
Honestly, a lot of my work on this website consists of trying to write “the generalized version” of something that’s bothering me that would not otherwise be of philosophical interest. I just think this has a pretty good track record of being philosophically productive! For example, you yourself have linked to my philosophy of language work, even though you probably don’t care about the reason I originally got so obsessed with the philosophy of language in the first place. To me, that’s an encouraging sign that I got the philosophy right (rather than the philosophy being thinly-veiled politics).
Yes, I think this instinct has mostly served you well. In this instance, though, it appears to me to cross some hard-to-define line, maybe because it’s about drama I’m tangentially involved in?
I roughly think that the previous post was more clearly on the “frontpage side” than this one, and this one is edge-casey. (I’m only one of the mods and we don’t all agree all the time, but for people modeling where the line is in mod-judgment-aggregate, uh, that’s my current take)
I have no power to decide what’s on the frontpage, but I’m glad these posts aren’t there because they make general points in a way that read to me as continuations of meta-discussions about the site and use examples from those discussions not so much as examples (because you could have easily made up more relatable examples, and the examples you chose are not salient to more than maybe a hundred people) but what seems to me to be a a way to make points against what’s happening in those conversations. This feature makes these posts feel like thinly-veiled drama posting to me.
To be fair, I don’t know your actual motivations, so this is just based on the vibe I’m getting reading them, but I think the vibe I (and others?) pick up reading a post is pretty important for what should be on the frontpage.
Honestly, a lot of my work on this website consists of trying to write “the generalized version” of something that’s bothering me that would not otherwise be of philosophical interest. I just think this has a pretty good track record of being philosophically productive! For example, you yourself have linked to my philosophy of language work, even though you probably don’t care about the reason I originally got so obsessed with the philosophy of language in the first place. To me, that’s an encouraging sign that I got the philosophy right (rather than the philosophy being thinly-veiled politics).
Yes, I think this instinct has mostly served you well. In this instance, though, it appears to me to cross some hard-to-define line, maybe because it’s about drama I’m tangentially involved in?
I roughly think that the previous post was more clearly on the “frontpage side” than this one, and this one is edge-casey. (I’m only one of the mods and we don’t all agree all the time, but for people modeling where the line is in mod-judgment-aggregate, uh, that’s my current take)