When writing a comment on LessWrong, I often know exactly which criticisms people will give. I will have thought through those criticisms and checked that they’re not valid, but I won’t be able to answer them all in my post, because that would make my post so long that no-one would read it. It seems like I’ve got to let people criticise me, and then shoot them down. This seems awfully inefficient, it’s like the purpose of having a discussion rather than me simply writing a long post is just to trick people into reading it.
I suppose if you have an external blog, you can simply summarize the potential criticisms on your LW post and link to a further discussion of them elsewhere. Or you can structure your post such that it discusses them at the very end:
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Optional reading:
In this way you get your point across first, while those interested can continue on to the detailed analysis.
One thing I do when trying to anticipate possible objections is to simply acknowledge them briefly in a parenthetical and then say something like “but these objections are weak” or “these objections have some validity but suffer from problems. Addressing them in detail would make this post too long.”
When writing a comment on LessWrong, I often know exactly which criticisms people will give. I will have thought through those criticisms and checked that they’re not valid, but I won’t be able to answer them all in my post, because that would make my post so long that no-one would read it. It seems like I’ve got to let people criticise me, and then shoot them down. This seems awfully inefficient, it’s like the purpose of having a discussion rather than me simply writing a long post is just to trick people into reading it.
Footnotes.
I suppose if you have an external blog, you can simply summarize the potential criticisms on your LW post and link to a further discussion of them elsewhere. Or you can structure your post such that it discusses them at the very end:
======
Optional reading:
In this way you get your point across first, while those interested can continue on to the detailed analysis.
Briefly summarize expected objections and write whatever you want to write about them in a comment to your comment.
One thing I do when trying to anticipate possible objections is to simply acknowledge them briefly in a parenthetical and then say something like “but these objections are weak” or “these objections have some validity but suffer from problems. Addressing them in detail would make this post too long.”