Hmm, this sure is a kind of weird edge-case of the coauthor system for dialogues.
I do think there really should be some indication that niplav hasn't actually responded here, but also, I don't want to just remove them and via that remove their ability to respond in the dialogue. I'll leave it as is for now and hope this comment is enough to clear things up, but if people are confused I might temporarily remove niplav.
I now sent the following message to niplav, asking them if they wanted me to take the dialogue down and republish as shortform. I am slightly embarrassed about not having considered that it's somewhat inconvenient to receive one of these dialogue-things without warning.
I just didn't think through that dialogue-post thing at all. Obviously it will show up on your profile-wall (I didn't think about that), and that has lots of reputational repercussions and such (which matter!). I wasn't simulating your perspective at all in the decision to publish it in the way I did. I just operated on heuristics like:
---
If you prefer, I'll move the post into a shortform preceded by:
[This started as something I wanted to send to niplav, but then I realized I wanted to share these ideas with more people. So I wrote it with the intention of publishing it, while keeping the style and content mostly as if I had purely addressed it to them alone.]
I feel somewhat embarrassed about having posted it as a dialogue without thinking it through, and this embarrassment exactly cancels out my disinclination against unpublishing it, so I'm neutral wrt moving it to shortform. Let me know! ^^
P.S. No hurry.
In this particular instance, I'm completely fine this happening—because I trust & like you :-)
In general, this move is probably too much for the other party, unless they give consent. But as I said, I'm fine/happy with being addressed in a dialogue—and LessWrong is better for this than schelling.pt, especially for the longer convos we tend to have. Who knows, maybe I'll even find time to respond in a non-vacuous manner & we can have a long-term back & forth in this dialogue.
Quick mod note – this post seems like a pretty earnest, well intentioned version of "address a dialogue to someone who hasn't opted into it". But, it's the sort of thing I'd expect to often be kind of annoying. I haven't chatted with other mods yet about whether we want to allow this sort of thing longterm, but, flagging that we're tracking it as an edge case to think about.
niplav
Just to ward of misunderstanding and/or possible feelings of todo-list-overflow: I don't expect you to engage or write a serious reply or anything; I mostly just prefer writing in public to people-in-particular, rather than writing to the faceless crowd. Treat it as if I wrote a Schelling.pt outgabbling in response to a comment; it just happens to be on LW. If I'm breaking etiquette or causing miffedness for Complex Social Reasons (which are often very valid reasons to have, just to be clear) then lmk! : )
Wait, so is this a dialogue or not? It's certainly styled as one, and has two LW users as authors, but... only one of them has written anything (yet), and seemingly doesn't expect the other one to engage? Wouldn't this have been better off as a post or a shortform or something like that?
I wanted to leave Niplav the option of replying at correspondence-pace at some point if they felt like it. I also wanted to say these things in public, to expose more people to the ideas, but without optimizing my phrasing/formatting for general-audience consumption.
I usually think people think better if they generally aim their thoughts at one person at a time. People lose their brains and get eaten by language games if their intellectual output is consistently too impersonal.
Also, I think if I were somebody else, I would appreciate me for sharing a message which I₁ mainly intended for Niplav, as long as I₂ managed to learn something interesting from it. So if I₁ think it's positive for me₂ to write the post, I₁ think I₁ should go ahead. But I'll readjust if anybody says they dislike it. : )
Alright, that's cool. I'm not actually bothered by it, and in any case I don't intend to exert social pressure to enforce any kind of norm about this that mods might disagree with.