Oh, maybe this is the whole problem with this issue? This is the sentence I wrote:
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
This is the sentence I am pretty sure I meant to write (and is as far as I can tell the only way to make the sentence work out grammatically):
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, [have complained along these lines] about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
It’s now been long enough that I am not 100% confident this is what I meant to write, but it’s certainly how I remember that thread.
That said, even granting that I had instead written something more like “My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on have been discouraged from posting on this site because of you, in-particular”, then I absolutely stand by that as well! “Being discouraged” from something does not mean “they have completely stopped the relevant behavior”.
“Being discouraged” is a much weaker proposition than “has mentioned being annoyed by specifically that user to the head-admin”. I do not hear about the vast vast majority of things that cause people to be discouraged from posting on LW. By the time I hear about them it’s a much bigger deal than the vast majority of things in that class.
I agree that in as much you interpreted my statement as “these authors have all stopped posting on the site because of you”, then of course my statement is obviously blatantly wrong. But I don’t understand how that hypothesis would even be available, given that I myself was in the list, and I am of course still posting on the site!
I think upon rereading it’s plausible Said did intend to only refer to people who completely stopped posting on the site. I think I extended the category of person in a somewhat rude way, and I think that was not ideal. But I also think I did so in a way that was pretty obvious and not actually misleading, as again I included myself in the category which really feels like it makes it hard to interpret my statement that way. I also think the fact that Said asked Ben “(Are you one of them?)” clearly implies he is just talking about a general kind of “discouragement” since of course Ben has not been driven off site by Said.
Yeah, thinking more about this, I stand behind my initial reaction. The fact that Said asked Ben “Are you one of them” clearly implies Said is not talking about authors that were literally driven off the site, but just talking about authors who were generally (non-trivially) discouraged by posting on the site by Said. This makes this interpretation of yours seem highly tenuous:
that does not make it correct to say that their opinion was so negative that it was enough to discourage them from posting on the website. (I think it would be really surprising if such an extreme negative opinion could be so easily “flipped entirely to become positive.”)
It is perhaps a crux that I’m interpreting “find[ing] [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” as a much stronger claim than “complain[ing] about [a commenter]”, such that correct answers to questions about the latter would be very often incorrect answers to questions about the former.
I think it’s quite clear from context that Said and Ben and I were talking about “authors discouraged by Said from posting on LW”. Not in a way that implies they completely stopped posting, but in a way that it played some non-trivial impediment, and I continue to think this true of everyone I listed, and this is of course a much lower bar than “complaining about a commenter”. By the time someone directly complains about a commenter the discouragement is quite intense.
I intended to report specific complaints that provide evidence of people being discouraged (in some non-trivial way), but did sure produce a non-grammatical sentence that made it sound more like I am making a statement of general fact about the net-discouragement of those people.
I do also stand behind that broader statement, and would find your responses frustrating and exaggerated and ungrounded even if I had intended to say that, and unambiguously done so. But, if I had understood your read of my sentence better, would have reacted with somewhat less frustration (because saying that someone is misleading about a statement of difficult interpretation in the presence of contravening evidence, even if that seems unsubstantiated, is still much less frustrating than having someone go around and say that you are lying about directly observable facts).
For the fraction of our conversation that was frustrating due to my grammatical error, and unclear communication in that comment, as well as further frustration caused by me not noticing that what I wrote was unclear earlier in this conversation, I apologize.
In my model of the conversation you kept directly indicating that I was misreporting evidence, but I now see how my sentence was more ambiguous than I thought. That said, I continue to strongly disagree that in the world where I did make an unambiguous statement of general inference (that these authors were discouraged from posting on LW) that you finding the kind of comment that Jacob made, or the kind of statement that Scott made, that this would be any substantial evidence against my integrity (indeed, I continue to believe the same and would continue to write that same statement today, though in the case of Jacob would link to his 2018 comment as some countervailing evidence).
As an outsider to all of this, from my perspective I don’t know why you keep letting him bait you into continuing this argument. It doesn’t appear productive and it’s just dragging everyone through the mud as everyone tries to get the last word in?
Oh, maybe this is the whole problem with this issue? This is the sentence I wrote:
This is the sentence I am pretty sure I meant to write (and is as far as I can tell the only way to make the sentence work out grammatically):
It’s now been long enough that I am not 100% confident this is what I meant to write, but it’s certainly how I remember that thread.
That said, even granting that I had instead written something more like “My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on have been discouraged from posting on this site because of you, in-particular”, then I absolutely stand by that as well! “Being discouraged” from something does not mean “they have completely stopped the relevant behavior”.
“Being discouraged” is a much weaker proposition than “has mentioned being annoyed by specifically that user to the head-admin”. I do not hear about the vast vast majority of things that cause people to be discouraged from posting on LW. By the time I hear about them it’s a much bigger deal than the vast majority of things in that class.
I agree that in as much you interpreted my statement as “these authors have all stopped posting on the site because of you”, then of course my statement is obviously blatantly wrong. But I don’t understand how that hypothesis would even be available, given that I myself was in the list, and I am of course still posting on the site!
I think upon rereading it’s plausible Said did intend to only refer to people who completely stopped posting on the site. I think I extended the category of person in a somewhat rude way, and I think that was not ideal. But I also think I did so in a way that was pretty obvious and not actually misleading, as again I included myself in the category which really feels like it makes it hard to interpret my statement that way. I also think the fact that Said asked Ben “(Are you one of them?)” clearly implies he is just talking about a general kind of “discouragement” since of course Ben has not been driven off site by Said.
Yeah, thinking more about this, I stand behind my initial reaction. The fact that Said asked Ben “Are you one of them” clearly implies Said is not talking about authors that were literally driven off the site, but just talking about authors who were generally (non-trivially) discouraged by posting on the site by Said. This makes this interpretation of yours seem highly tenuous:
I think it’s quite clear from context that Said and Ben and I were talking about “authors discouraged by Said from posting on LW”. Not in a way that implies they completely stopped posting, but in a way that it played some non-trivial impediment, and I continue to think this true of everyone I listed, and this is of course a much lower bar than “complaining about a commenter”. By the time someone directly complains about a commenter the discouragement is quite intense.
I intended to report specific complaints that provide evidence of people being discouraged (in some non-trivial way), but did sure produce a non-grammatical sentence that made it sound more like I am making a statement of general fact about the net-discouragement of those people.
I do also stand behind that broader statement, and would find your responses frustrating and exaggerated and ungrounded even if I had intended to say that, and unambiguously done so. But, if I had understood your read of my sentence better, would have reacted with somewhat less frustration (because saying that someone is misleading about a statement of difficult interpretation in the presence of contravening evidence, even if that seems unsubstantiated, is still much less frustrating than having someone go around and say that you are lying about directly observable facts).
For the fraction of our conversation that was frustrating due to my grammatical error, and unclear communication in that comment, as well as further frustration caused by me not noticing that what I wrote was unclear earlier in this conversation, I apologize.
In my model of the conversation you kept directly indicating that I was misreporting evidence, but I now see how my sentence was more ambiguous than I thought. That said, I continue to strongly disagree that in the world where I did make an unambiguous statement of general inference (that these authors were discouraged from posting on LW) that you finding the kind of comment that Jacob made, or the kind of statement that Scott made, that this would be any substantial evidence against my integrity (indeed, I continue to believe the same and would continue to write that same statement today, though in the case of Jacob would link to his 2018 comment as some countervailing evidence).
As an outsider to all of this, from my perspective I don’t know why you keep letting him bait you into continuing this argument. It doesn’t appear productive and it’s just dragging everyone through the mud as everyone tries to get the last word in?