(This is a misread of the seventh guideline. The seventh guideline doesn’t say that you shouldn’t hypothesize about what other people believe, it says that you should flag those hypotheses so that they can’t possibly be mistaken for assertions of fact. That’s why the above says “my understanding” and “unless I miss him” rather than just saying “Zack doesn’t think so either.” I’d be interested in a statement of what Zack-guideline the above “here’s what I think he believes?” falls afoul of.)
The issue is that I have no idea where you’re getting that hypothesis from. What have I written, anywhere, that makes you think I would disapprove of Alexei’s comment?
The seventh guideline doesn’t say that you shouldn’t hypothesize about what other people believe
In accordance with the Eighth Guideline, I would like to revise the wording of my invocation of the Seventh Guideline in the grandparent: given our history of communication failures, I think your comments would be better if you try to avoid posing hypotheses (not “making claims”) about what I believe in the absence of direct textual evidence, in accordance with the Seventh Guideline.
(But again, that’s just my opinion about how I think you could write better comments; I don’t consider it a “request.”)
I’d be interested in a statement of what Zack-guideline the above “here’s what I think he believes?” falls afoul of.
I still think your Seventh Guideline applies as written. All three of your examples of “ways a Seventh Guideline request might look” seem appropriate to me with some small adaptations for context (notwithstanding that I don’t believe in “requests”).
You wrote:
“wow, I support this way less than I otherwise would have, because your (hypothesized) straightforward diagnosis of what was going on in a large conflict over norms seems to me to be kind of petty” is contra both my norms and my understanding of Zack’s preferred norms; unless I miss him entirely neither one of us wants LessWrong to be the kind of place where that sort of factor weighs very heavily in people’s analysis.
The first example of a way a Seventh Guideline request might look says,
That’s not what I wrote, though. Can you please engage with what I wrote?
I can’t quite ask you to engage with what I wrote, because your hypothesis that I don’t “want LessWrong to be the kind of place where that sort of factor weighs very heavily in people’s analysis” bears no obvious resemblance to anything I’ve written, so it’s not clear what part of my writing I should be directing you to read more carefully.
In fact, I don’t even read the pettiness judgement as having weighed very heavily in Alexei’s analysis! Alexei wrote, “Overall strong upvote from me, but I’m not doing it because [...]”. I interpret this as saying that the pettiness of that section was enough of a detractor from the value of the post that he didn’t feel like awarding a strong-upvote, which I regard as distinct from weighing heavily in his analysis of the contents of the rest of the post themselves (as contrasted to his analysis of whether to strong-upvote). If it looks like Dante was motivated to write The Inferno in order to have a short section at the end depicting his enemies suffering divine punishment, that’s definitely something Dante scholars should be allowed to notice and criticize, without that weighing heavily into their analysis of the preceding 4000 lines: there’s a lot of stuff in those 4000 lines to be analyzed, separately from the fact that it’s all building up to the enemy torture scene. (I’m doing a decent amount of interpretation here; if Alexei happens to make the poor time-allocation decision of reading this subthread, he is encouraged to invoke the Seventh Guideline against this paragraph.)
The second example of a way a Seventh Guideline request might look says,
Er, you seem to be putting a lot of words in my mouth.
I think this applies? (A previous revision of this comment said “This applies straightforwardly”, but maybe you think the “my understanding”/”unless I miss him” disclaimers exclude the possibility of “putting words in someone’s mouth”?)
The third and final example of a way a Seventh Guideline request might look says,
I feel like I’m being asked to defend a position I haven’t taken. Can you point at what I said that made you think I think X?
“Asked to defend” doesn’t apply, but the question does. Can you point at what I said that made you think that I think that Alexei’s comment weighs the pettiness judgement very heavily in his analysis and that I don’t want Less Wrong to be the kind of place?
After being prompted by this thread and thinking for a minute, I was able to come up with a reason I should arguably disapprove of Alexei’s comment: that pettiness is not intellectually substantive (the section is correct or not separately from whether it’s a petty thing to point out) and letting a pettiness assessment flip the decision of whether to upvote makes karma scores less useful. I don’t feel that strongly about this and wouldn’t have come up with it without prompting because I’m not a karma-grubber: I think it’s, well, petty to complain about someone’s reasons for downvoting or witholding an upvote.
(This is a misread of the seventh guideline. The seventh guideline doesn’t say that you shouldn’t hypothesize about what other people believe, it says that you should flag those hypotheses so that they can’t possibly be mistaken for assertions of fact. That’s why the above says “my understanding” and “unless I miss him” rather than just saying “Zack doesn’t think so either.” I’d be interested in a statement of what Zack-guideline the above “here’s what I think he believes?” falls afoul of.)
The issue is that I have no idea where you’re getting that hypothesis from. What have I written, anywhere, that makes you think I would disapprove of Alexei’s comment?
In accordance with the Eighth Guideline, I would like to revise the wording of my invocation of the Seventh Guideline in the grandparent: given our history of communication failures, I think your comments would be better if you try to avoid posing hypotheses (not “making claims”) about what I believe in the absence of direct textual evidence, in accordance with the Seventh Guideline.
(But again, that’s just my opinion about how I think you could write better comments; I don’t consider it a “request.”)
I still think your Seventh Guideline applies as written. All three of your examples of “ways a Seventh Guideline request might look” seem appropriate to me with some small adaptations for context (notwithstanding that I don’t believe in “requests”).
You wrote:
The first example of a way a Seventh Guideline request might look says,
I can’t quite ask you to engage with what I wrote, because your hypothesis that I don’t “want LessWrong to be the kind of place where that sort of factor weighs very heavily in people’s analysis” bears no obvious resemblance to anything I’ve written, so it’s not clear what part of my writing I should be directing you to read more carefully.
In fact, I don’t even read the pettiness judgement as having weighed very heavily in Alexei’s analysis! Alexei wrote, “Overall strong upvote from me, but I’m not doing it because [...]”. I interpret this as saying that the pettiness of that section was enough of a detractor from the value of the post that he didn’t feel like awarding a strong-upvote, which I regard as distinct from weighing heavily in his analysis of the contents of the rest of the post themselves (as contrasted to his analysis of whether to strong-upvote). If it looks like Dante was motivated to write The Inferno in order to have a short section at the end depicting his enemies suffering divine punishment, that’s definitely something Dante scholars should be allowed to notice and criticize, without that weighing heavily into their analysis of the preceding 4000 lines: there’s a lot of stuff in those 4000 lines to be analyzed, separately from the fact that it’s all building up to the enemy torture scene. (I’m doing a decent amount of interpretation here; if Alexei happens to make the poor time-allocation decision of reading this subthread, he is encouraged to invoke the Seventh Guideline against this paragraph.)
The second example of a way a Seventh Guideline request might look says,
I think this applies? (A previous revision of this comment said “This applies straightforwardly”, but maybe you think the “my understanding”/”unless I miss him” disclaimers exclude the possibility of “putting words in someone’s mouth”?)
The third and final example of a way a Seventh Guideline request might look says,
“Asked to defend” doesn’t apply, but the question does. Can you point at what I said that made you think that I think that Alexei’s comment weighs the pettiness judgement very heavily in his analysis and that I don’t want Less Wrong to be the kind of place?
After being prompted by this thread and thinking for a minute, I was able to come up with a reason I should arguably disapprove of Alexei’s comment: that pettiness is not intellectually substantive (the section is correct or not separately from whether it’s a petty thing to point out) and letting a pettiness assessment flip the decision of whether to upvote makes karma scores less useful. I don’t feel that strongly about this and wouldn’t have come up with it without prompting because I’m not a karma-grubber: I think it’s, well, petty to complain about someone’s reasons for downvoting or witholding an upvote.