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wedrifid comments on Boring Advice Repository - Less Wrong Discussion
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My transparency was an illusion.
If the advice "do not get divorced" is considered sufficiently important and divorce rates are sufficiently high then it would follow that all else being equal "do not get married" is good advice.
(I'm not myself advocating or opposing either potential pieces of advice.)
The closest analogous prompt here would be for a followup of "Don't be sedentary." This is a little weaker since not getting married is far better at preventing divorce than not being sedentary is at preventing obesity.
Thanks for unpacking that.
However, your argument is too fully general:
If the advice "do not get in situation X" is considered sufficiently important it would follow that all else being equal Do whatever it takes to minimize the chances of getting in situation X is good advice.
This also applies to "kill yourself asap" being a good corollary if "don't eat too much marmalade" is considered sufficiently important, all else being equal. Strictly true, yes. Useful, no.
We have to acknowledge that these pieces of advice do not live in a vacuum where we can consider various values for their relative importance while keeping all the myriad other goals constant. That's not "carving reality at its joints", as the expression goes.
There are incentives to getting married, and without weighing those "do not get married" cannot be a general corollary of "do not get divorced" except in a spherical cows kind of scenario.
My argument included disclaimers that you evidently missed.
I reject the reference class.
The grandparent was concerned only with the reasoning structure of "X sufficiently important -> Y (which helps in bringing about X) is good advice" being too fully general, without going into specific X's or Y's other than as examples. So your "(I'm not myself advocating or opposing either potential pieces of advice.)" did not apply. I don't see any other relevant disclaimers.
All else being equal. It is incompatible with your interpretation which talks about utterly absurd "fully general" claims which I do not make.
You provide an argument for how "do not marry" could be derived from "do not divorce". Without endorsing either of those claims, you still presumably endorse the reasoning mechanism you yourself introduced.
The structure of the argument you provide is "if X is sufficiently important then Y (which helps in bringing about X) is good advice" (ceteris paribus).
I show you why the above reasoning structure that you used is too general by showing how it would equally prop up e.g. the "not eating marmalade sufficiently important" -> "suicide as the surest way to avoid eating marmalade" step. Using your very own argument; which you apparently accept in one case, yet reject in the other.
Now, I'm glad you agree that an application of the very same kind of reasoning you provided just as easily leads to "utterly absurd" claims, as made evident by checking it against border cases.
Why then do you still defend its use in your initial comment?
Concerning the "all else being equal", you evidently missed the "... while keeping all the myriad other goals constant". I'm sure you appreciate the irony.
Let's go back to DEFCON 5 now.