lukeprog comments on BOOK DRAFT: 'Ethics and Superintelligence' (part 1) - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is a difference between popular writing and academic writing. The opening is my abstract. See here.
The problem that I described in my first paragraph is there regardless of how popular or academic a style you're aiming for. The bold, attention-grabbing claims about extinction/utopia/the fate of the world are a turnoff, and they actually seem more out of place for academic writing than for popular writing.
If you don't want to spend more time elaborating on your argument in order to make the bold claims sound plausible, you could just get rid of those bold claims. Maybe you could include one mention of the high stakes in your abstract, as part of the teaser of the argument to come, rather than vividly describing the high stakes before and after the abstract as a way to shout out "hey this is really important!"
Thanks for your comment, but I'm going with a different style. This kind of opening is actually quite common in Anglophone philosophy, as the quickest route to tenure is to make really bold claims and then come up with ingenius ways of defending them.
I know that Less Wrong can be somewhat averse to the style of contemporary Anglophone philosophy, but that will not dissuade me from using it. To drive home the point that my style here is common in Anglophone philosophy (I'm avoiding calling it analytic philosophy), here a few examples...
The opening paragraphs of David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds, in which he defends a radical view known as modal realism, that all possible worlds actually exist:
Opening paragraph (abstract) of Neil Sinhababu's "Possible Girls" for the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly:
Opening paragraph of Peter Klein's "Human Knowledge and the Infinite Regress of Reasons" for Philosophical Perspectives:
And, the opening paragraph of Steven Maitzen's paper arguing that a classical theistic argument actually proves atheism:
And those are just the first four works that came to mind. This kind of abrupt opening is the style of Anglophone philosophy, and that's the style I'm using. Anyone who keeps up with Anglophone philosophy lives and breathes this style of writing every week.
Anglophone philosophy is not written for people who are casually browsing for interesting things to read. It is written for academics who have hundreds and hundreds of papers and books we might need to read, and we need to know right away in the opening lines whether or not a particular book or paper addresses the problems we are researching.