That’s not how it works. An apparent ad hom is usually taken as evidence that an ad hom took place. You are engaging in special pleading. This is like the way that people who are suffering from confirmation bias will demand very high levels of evidence before they change their minds. Not that you are suffering from confirmation bias.
Brown is terrible and so is everyone associated with him,
The larger point here is that the link between “Eliezer Yudkowsky called Richard Loosemore an idiot” and “People on Less Wrong should be expected to shoot the messenger if someone turns up saying that something many of them believe is false” is incredibly tenuous.
I mean, to make that an actual argument you’d need something like the following steps.
EY called RL an idiot.
EY did not have sufficient grounds for calling RL an idiot.
EY was doing it because RL disagreed with him.
EY has/had a general practice of attacking people who disagree with him.
Other people on LW should be expected to behave the same way as EY.
So if someone comes along expressing disagreement, we should expect people on LW to attack them.
I’ve been pointing out that the step from the first of those to the second is one that requires some justification, but the same is true of all the others.
So, anyway: you’re talking as if you’d said “EY’s comment was an ad hominem attack” and I’d said “No it wasn’t”, but actually neither of those is right. You just quoted EY’s comment and implied that it justified your opinion about the LW population generally; and what I said about it wasn’t that it wasn’t ad hominem. It was a personal attack (I wouldn’t use the specific term “ad hominem” because that too strongly suggests the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem, which is when you say “X’s claim is wrong because X is an idiot” or something like that, and that isn’t what EY was doing; but it was, for sure, a personal attack). I just don’t think it’s much evidence of a general messenger-shooting tendency on LW, and I think that to make it into evidence of that you’d need to justify each step in (something like) the chain of propositions above, and you haven’t made the slightest attempt to do so. And that, not whether it was an ad hominem, is what we are disagreeing about.
Some comments on those steps. First step: Yes, EY certainly called RL an idiot, though I don’t think what he meant by it was quite the usual meaning of “idiot” and in particular I think what he meant by it is more compatible with being a professional AI researcher than the usual meaning of “idiot” is; specifically, I think he meant something like “There are fundamental points in the arguments I’ve been making that RL obstinately fails to grasp, and it seems no amount of discussion will show him the error of his ways”. Obstinately failing to grasp a particular point is, alas, a rather common failure mode even of many otherwise very impressive human brains. Note that if EY is wrong about this, the most likely actual situation is that EY is obstinately failing to grasp a (correct) fundamental point being made by RL. So one way or another, a professional AI researcher is an idiot in the relevant sense. So that circumstance is not so extraordinary that when someone claims it’s so we should jump to the conclusion that they are being unreasonable.
Second step: Kinda: my understanding is that EY and RL had been around more or less the same argumentative circle many times and made no progress. I think EY would have been clearly justified in saying “either RL is an idiot or I am”; I shall not try to pass judgement on how reasonable it was for him to be confident about which of them was missing something fundamental. Third step: No: I’m pretty sure EY was as forceful as he was because of past history of unproductive discussions with RL, and would likely not have said the same if someone else had raised the same issues as RL did, even though he’d have disagreed with them just as much. Fourth step: Kinda; while I don’t think it would be fair to expect EY to attack someone just because they disagreed, I do think he is generally too quick to attack. Fifth step: No, not at all; one person’s behaviour is not a reliable predictor of another’s. “Oh, but EY is super-high-status around here and everyone admires him!” Well, note for instance that the comment we’re discussing is sitting on a score of −23 right now; maybe the LW community admires Eliezer, but they don’t seem to admire this particular aspect. Sixth and final step: Not really: as I already said, I don’t think EY has a general messenger-shooting policy, so even if the LW community imitated everything he did we would not be justified in expecting them to do that.
That’s not how it works. An apparent ad hom is usually taken as evidence that an ad hom took place. You are engaging in special pleading. This is like the way that people who are suffering from confirmation bias will demand very high levels of evidence before they change their minds. Not that you are suffering from confirmation bias.
Another wild exageration of what I said.
The larger point here is that the link between “Eliezer Yudkowsky called Richard Loosemore an idiot” and “People on Less Wrong should be expected to shoot the messenger if someone turns up saying that something many of them believe is false” is incredibly tenuous.
I mean, to make that an actual argument you’d need something like the following steps.
EY called RL an idiot.
EY did not have sufficient grounds for calling RL an idiot.
EY was doing it because RL disagreed with him.
EY has/had a general practice of attacking people who disagree with him.
Other people on LW should be expected to behave the same way as EY.
So if someone comes along expressing disagreement, we should expect people on LW to attack them.
I’ve been pointing out that the step from the first of those to the second is one that requires some justification, but the same is true of all the others.
So, anyway: you’re talking as if you’d said “EY’s comment was an ad hominem attack” and I’d said “No it wasn’t”, but actually neither of those is right. You just quoted EY’s comment and implied that it justified your opinion about the LW population generally; and what I said about it wasn’t that it wasn’t ad hominem. It was a personal attack (I wouldn’t use the specific term “ad hominem” because that too strongly suggests the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem, which is when you say “X’s claim is wrong because X is an idiot” or something like that, and that isn’t what EY was doing; but it was, for sure, a personal attack). I just don’t think it’s much evidence of a general messenger-shooting tendency on LW, and I think that to make it into evidence of that you’d need to justify each step in (something like) the chain of propositions above, and you haven’t made the slightest attempt to do so. And that, not whether it was an ad hominem, is what we are disagreeing about.
Some comments on those steps. First step: Yes, EY certainly called RL an idiot, though I don’t think what he meant by it was quite the usual meaning of “idiot” and in particular I think what he meant by it is more compatible with being a professional AI researcher than the usual meaning of “idiot” is; specifically, I think he meant something like “There are fundamental points in the arguments I’ve been making that RL obstinately fails to grasp, and it seems no amount of discussion will show him the error of his ways”. Obstinately failing to grasp a particular point is, alas, a rather common failure mode even of many otherwise very impressive human brains. Note that if EY is wrong about this, the most likely actual situation is that EY is obstinately failing to grasp a (correct) fundamental point being made by RL. So one way or another, a professional AI researcher is an idiot in the relevant sense. So that circumstance is not so extraordinary that when someone claims it’s so we should jump to the conclusion that they are being unreasonable.
Second step: Kinda: my understanding is that EY and RL had been around more or less the same argumentative circle many times and made no progress. I think EY would have been clearly justified in saying “either RL is an idiot or I am”; I shall not try to pass judgement on how reasonable it was for him to be confident about which of them was missing something fundamental. Third step: No: I’m pretty sure EY was as forceful as he was because of past history of unproductive discussions with RL, and would likely not have said the same if someone else had raised the same issues as RL did, even though he’d have disagreed with them just as much. Fourth step: Kinda; while I don’t think it would be fair to expect EY to attack someone just because they disagreed, I do think he is generally too quick to attack. Fifth step: No, not at all; one person’s behaviour is not a reliable predictor of another’s. “Oh, but EY is super-high-status around here and everyone admires him!” Well, note for instance that the comment we’re discussing is sitting on a score of −23 right now; maybe the LW community admires Eliezer, but they don’t seem to admire this particular aspect. Sixth and final step: Not really: as I already said, I don’t think EY has a general messenger-shooting policy, so even if the LW community imitated everything he did we would not be justified in expecting them to do that.