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gRR comments on Against the Bottom Line - Less Wrong Discussion
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In the spirit of further contrarianism, I'll note that although your points are all valid, they do not really save the message of "The Bottom Line" post, unless you start interpreting the message in a rather liberal way instead of taking it literally, and this is undesirable under commonly held LW values.
[For example, atheists usually balk when people start interpreting the bible left and right, keeping the desirable conclusions and throwing away the rest, etc.]
No, it's functionally identical to the original analogy. Rationalists make it easy to change their bottom line as new evidence comes in, so their bottom line isn't fixed forever at the start.
For example, I recently scrapped a post because I found out that the anecdote I was going to start with wasn't what I thought it was at all, which raised my estimate that I was oversimplifying the rest of it. Yeah, I started with an idea of what I wanted to write, but when I learned new things I changed my confidence in that idea.
I agree. "The Bottom Line" is not formulated as well as it might have been. It is possible to come away with a literal understanding like yours, which is wrong in important respects.
((edited here) There's no point in discussing what the post "really" means. Its only function is to transmit ideas to readers. People's understanding of it may be a map, but it's the map we care about here, more than the territory.)