Yes, I changed the title to the linked page to ‘A path from Seattle’ from ‘Go east from Seattle’ because, from reading the comments here, I agree the original title was too misleading. Just updated the title of the Substack post also.
195 karma · joined April 27, 2019
I don't think the question requires the reader to ignore what ‘east’ means, however. There is unambiguously one direction at Seattle (tangent to the Earth's surface) which is facing due east.
I also didn't mean to take a patronising/arrogant tone to the reader and I'm sorry if that was the impression I gave.
Reading these comments I agree that the title is far too misleading (and unnecessarily so). Changed to “A path from Seattle”.
Effective altruism and such. A recent favourite: https://finmoorhouse.com/writing/clean-air/
The bottom line is network effects, I think.
https://qz.com/480741/this-free-online-encyclopedia-has-achi...
> Derek Parfit was famously a fast and creative thinker. He used to advise students and colleagues to set up autocomplete shortcuts on MS Word for their most commonly used phrases to boost their productivity, unaware that very few other philosophers felt that their productivity was being restricted by their typing speed. Despite this, he published sparingly. He hated to commit himself to arguments unless he was certain of them. What he did produce however were numerous, and lengthy, drafts of papers and books (at least two of which never saw the light of day) that were widely circulated amongst the philosophical community and even more voluminous comments and responses to other philosophers on how they could improve their arguments. Likening Derek to an iceberg would be mistaken. Up to 10% of an iceberg is above the waterline, whereas I doubt if even 1% of Derek's work has ever been published. As one of his obituaries noted ‘When Derek Parfit published, it mattered!'