Do you consider my credibility as an academic historian to be evidence?
Before seeing that comment I was confused as to whether Ra was talking about words (that Gleb said) to the effect of that or literally those words; now I see it was those words exactly.
this thread also brings to light something interesting:
Gleb: Lol, fair enough. You caught me well on that one. Let me update my statement to being unwilling to summarize whole books.
but then Gleb failed to actually add information from the book.
While I expect that the book holds claims to the effect of what Gleb intended to say; I feel like he didn’t do his full effort in supporting his claims; instead relying on his “credibility as an academic historian” to try to pass as the truth, as well as getting away without actually answering the question for providing more information.
I genuinely do not care about the topic; I admit that Gleb put in some effort to try to help offer insight to people; but I feel he did not put in the right effort in the right places, leading it to look like he was relying on his “credibility”. I can’t fault Ra for jumping on the issue; I can fault Ra for not doing it as gently and in good faith (and steelmanned) as possible. But from there; Gleb refused to continue the discussion and cited it as a personal attack.
looks like all parties at fault for that mess.
It’s now probably worthwhile suggesting a strategy for not having this happen again in the future:
I wrote one up recently here:
this comment: (By Gleb)
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mzw/link_a_rational_response_to_the_paris_attacks_and/cwzh
includes the line:
Before seeing that comment I was confused as to whether Ra was talking about words (that Gleb said) to the effect of that or literally those words; now I see it was those words exactly.
this thread also brings to light something interesting:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mzw/link_a_rational_response_to_the_paris_attacks_and/cx6p
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mzw/link_a_rational_response_to_the_paris_attacks_and/cx75
but then Gleb failed to actually add information from the book.
While I expect that the book holds claims to the effect of what Gleb intended to say; I feel like he didn’t do his full effort in supporting his claims; instead relying on his “credibility as an academic historian” to try to pass as the truth, as well as getting away without actually answering the question for providing more information.
I genuinely do not care about the topic; I admit that Gleb put in some effort to try to help offer insight to people; but I feel he did not put in the right effort in the right places, leading it to look like he was relying on his “credibility”. I can’t fault Ra for jumping on the issue; I can fault Ra for not doing it as gently and in good faith (and steelmanned) as possible. But from there; Gleb refused to continue the discussion and cited it as a personal attack.
looks like all parties at fault for that mess.
It’s now probably worthwhile suggesting a strategy for not having this happen again in the future: I wrote one up recently here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mzz/open_thread_nov_23_nov_29_2015/cwyl
On the part of Ra:
1: clean up the statement so that it is harder to take offensively (steelman)
On the part of Gleb:
2: encourage less personal offence from the original statement
both sides are needed to make discussions more productive. Either person could have put in more effort to improve the state of the discussion.
As an explicitly specific instruction: When you are feeling like a comment was an attack on you;
quote it;
say “did you mean X, otherwise that sounded like an attack; can you clarify?”
where X is a version of the statement that does not hold the attack; but still holds a debatable point.