No, the count already stood at at least one example. The citing had already been there, you just for some reason asked me to waste 20 minutes of my life finding a quote that was easier to extract than the reference to the discussion section that already sufficiently demonstrated this point (a quote which you very likely already knew about when you wrote this comment because you were literally the direct recipient of this comment and responded to it).
Neither of us for any second had any doubt that we could find a Duncan comment to this effect. What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
I’ll explain, then.
In general, in matters of public interest, that take place in the public eye, claims that concern facts of relevance to the matter under discussion or dispute ought not to be taken on anyone’s word. “Just trust me, bro” is not an acceptable standard of evidence, in any serious matter. This is the case even if (a) the claim is true, (b) the one who demands the evidence personally knows that it’s true.
When the moderator or administrator of a forum/community makes some claim about some dispute or some individual member who has some connection to the dispute, that claim ought to be trusted even less than claims normally are, and held to a higher standard of evidence. (In general, those who wield authority must be held to a higher standard of evidence. Epistemic lenience toward those who have power is both epistemically irrational and ethically improper—the former, because in such situations, the powerful often have a great incentive to mislead; the latter, because lenience in such cases serves the interests of those who misuse their power.)
And you, personally, have shown a remarkable[1] willingness, on this subject, to lie write in deeply misleading ways, misrepresent and distort the facts, describe and characterize events and situations in ways that create inaccurate impressions in naïve readers, and otherwise communicate in unprincipled and deceptive ways. (Examples: onetwothree.)
So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
P.S.: I will add that “denying its existence” is—as seems to be par for the course in this discussion—an inaccurate gloss.
So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
Look, the relevant comment was literally a reply to you. You knew what Duncan thought on this topic.
Maybe you forgot, we don’t have perfect memory, but I don’t buy that what is going on is not that you saw an opportunity to object to a thing that you approximately knew was correct because maybe I would fail to find an easy-to-quote excerpt from Duncan, or maybe you literally hoped to just waste a bit more of my time, or successfully cause me to end up frustrated and embarrass myself in some way.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format. The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence, instead of playing games where you claim that “there are no instances where X turns out to be straightforwardly true”, when like, you yourself were the direct recipient of a comment that said that exact thing, and I had already linked to the post where that comment was made, and where the overall point was obvious even without the specific quote I dug up.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
And, I repeat, all of this is especially true given your track record on this subject.
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned? I mean, I agree that ultimately you do not have that much more to lose, so IDK, you can make this choice, I can’t double-ban you, but it still seems like a dick move.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
No, the thing I said is that people cite you as the reason for not wanting to post on LW. I didn’t make the claim that any such statement was easily extracted from context, or was somehow perfectly unambiguous, or any such thing. Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I never claimed that it would “no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs”, so this is a strawman. The relevance of the situation, and its effect on epistemic conduct, is explained in my earlier comment.
Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
But that’s of course not what I said. I did not say “Duncan said X”. I said (paraphrased) “Duncan cited X in the context of Y” and “[Duncan] made a statement to this affect on LW”.
I am dropping out of this thread. It seems as productive as many of the threads have been with you.
Someone else should feel free to pick it up and I might respond more. I do think there are potentially valuable points to be made around the degree to which this decision was made as a result of author complaints, what actual authors on LW believe about your contributions, etc. But this specific subthread seems pretty evidently a waste of time.
No, the count already stood at at least one example. The citing had already been there, you just for some reason asked me to waste 20 minutes of my life finding a quote that was easier to extract than the reference to the discussion section that already sufficiently demonstrated this point (a quote which you very likely already knew about when you wrote this comment because you were literally the direct recipient of this comment and responded to it).
Neither of us for any second had any doubt that we could find a Duncan comment to this effect. What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
I’ll explain, then.
In general, in matters of public interest, that take place in the public eye, claims that concern facts of relevance to the matter under discussion or dispute ought not to be taken on anyone’s word. “Just trust me, bro” is not an acceptable standard of evidence, in any serious matter. This is the case even if (a) the claim is true, (b) the one who demands the evidence personally knows that it’s true.
When the moderator or administrator of a forum/community makes some claim about some dispute or some individual member who has some connection to the dispute, that claim ought to be trusted even less than claims normally are, and held to a higher standard of evidence. (In general, those who wield authority must be held to a higher standard of evidence. Epistemic lenience toward those who have power is both epistemically irrational and ethically improper—the former, because in such situations, the powerful often have a great incentive to mislead; the latter, because lenience in such cases serves the interests of those who misuse their power.)
And you, personally, have shown a remarkable[1] willingness, on this subject, to
liewrite in deeply misleading ways, misrepresent and distort the facts, describe and characterize events and situations in ways that create inaccurate impressions in naïve readers, and otherwise communicate in unprincipled and deceptive ways. (Examples: one two three.)So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
P.S.: I will add that “denying its existence” is—as seems to be par for the course in this discussion—an inaccurate gloss.
And quite surprising, too, at least to me. I really would not have expected it. Perhaps this simply speaks ill of my ability to judge character.
Look, the relevant comment was literally a reply to you. You knew what Duncan thought on this topic.
Maybe you forgot, we don’t have perfect memory, but I don’t buy that what is going on is not that you saw an opportunity to object to a thing that you approximately knew was correct because maybe I would fail to find an easy-to-quote excerpt from Duncan, or maybe you literally hoped to just waste a bit more of my time, or successfully cause me to end up frustrated and embarrass myself in some way.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format. The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence, instead of playing games where you claim that “there are no instances where X turns out to be straightforwardly true”, when like, you yourself were the direct recipient of a comment that said that exact thing, and I had already linked to the post where that comment was made, and where the overall point was obvious even without the specific quote I dug up.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
And, I repeat, all of this is especially true given your track record on this subject.
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned? I mean, I agree that ultimately you do not have that much more to lose, so IDK, you can make this choice, I can’t double-ban you, but it still seems like a dick move.
No, the thing I said is that people cite you as the reason for not wanting to post on LW. I didn’t make the claim that any such statement was easily extracted from context, or was somehow perfectly unambiguous, or any such thing. Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
I never claimed that it would “no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs”, so this is a strawman. The relevance of the situation, and its effect on epistemic conduct, is explained in my earlier comment.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
But that’s of course not what I said. I did not say “Duncan said X”. I said (paraphrased) “Duncan cited X in the context of Y” and “[Duncan] made a statement to this affect on LW”.
I am dropping out of this thread. It seems as productive as many of the threads have been with you.
Someone else should feel free to pick it up and I might respond more. I do think there are potentially valuable points to be made around the degree to which this decision was made as a result of author complaints, what actual authors on LW believe about your contributions, etc. But this specific subthread seems pretty evidently a waste of time.