It’s much easier for me not to say anything, but my model of Duncan would prefer for me to comment.
Overall strong upvote from me, but I’m not doing it because: what is up with the section about Zack Davis?? I’m not disputing the veracity here, because I don’t know. But it just doesn’t feel at all necessary or even useful to have it in this post. Just comes across as kind of petty. Kind if like writing The Inferno just so you can categorize and viscerally describe your enemies in hell.
See Zack’s engagement with Basics of Rationalist Discourse, and multiple subsequent essays.
As an aside, “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.
(I already lost the battle, though; the fact that socially-motivated moves like the above rapidly become highly upvoted is a big chunk of why I gave up on trying to be on LessWrong generally, and why all my content goes elsewhere now.)
For what it’s worth, I upvoted Alexei’s comment in part because—not having read the conversations between you and Zack—I literally had no idea what sentences like “when [Zack] tries to tell you what constitutes good conduct and productive discourse” were referring to. You didn’t explain what Zack’s views on this were and didn’t even have a link to him explaining his views that I could follow to find out what they were, so basically that section read to me as “huh Duncan is saying that Zack is bad but not really explaining why we should think so, that was weird and random”.
Yeah I’m going to go back in and add links, partly due to this comment thread and partly at Zack’s (reasonable, correct!) request; I should’ve done that in the first place and lose points for not doing so. Apologies, Zack.
Clarification: I didn’t think of that as a “request.” I was saying that according to my standards, I would be embarrassed to publish criticism of someone that didn’t quote or link to their writings, and that it seemed to me to be in tension with your condemnations of strawmanning.
I don’t think of that as a request that you change it, because in general, I don’t think I have “jurisdiction” over other people’s writing. If someone says something I think is wrong, my response is to write my own comment or post explaining why I think it’s wrong (or perhaps mention it in person at Less Online), which they can respond or not-respond to as they see fit. You don’t owe me anything!
I haven’t thought that much about how I feel about this kind of thing in general, but in this case it seems clear that that section is definitely compatible with Zack’s norms, and so it feels in that context totally fine to me (I haven’t thought much about how I would feel about it for other people).
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.
Um, I strong-upvoted and strong-agreement-voted Alexei’s comment.
Given our history of communication failures, I think your comments would be better if you try to avoid making claims about what I believe in the absence of direct textual evidence, in accordance with the Seventh Guideline.
But, crucially, that’s me saying I think your comments would be better comments if you did that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to extrapolate my views if you want to. You don’t owe me anything!
(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.
It’s much easier for me not to say anything, but my model of Duncan would prefer for me to comment.
Overall strong upvote from me, but I’m not doing it because: what is up with the section about Zack Davis?? I’m not disputing the veracity here, because I don’t know. But it just doesn’t feel at all necessary or even useful to have it in this post. Just comes across as kind of petty. Kind if like writing The Inferno just so you can categorize and viscerally describe your enemies in hell.
See Zack’s engagement with Basics of Rationalist Discourse, and multiple subsequent essays.
As an aside, “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.
(I already lost the battle, though; the fact that socially-motivated moves like the above rapidly become highly upvoted is a big chunk of why I gave up on trying to be on LessWrong generally, and why all my content goes elsewhere now.)
For what it’s worth, I upvoted Alexei’s comment in part because—not having read the conversations between you and Zack—I literally had no idea what sentences like “when [Zack] tries to tell you what constitutes good conduct and productive discourse” were referring to. You didn’t explain what Zack’s views on this were and didn’t even have a link to him explaining his views that I could follow to find out what they were, so basically that section read to me as “huh Duncan is saying that Zack is bad but not really explaining why we should think so, that was weird and random”.
(Though I did strong-upvote your post anyway.)
Yeah I’m going to go back in and add links, partly due to this comment thread and partly at Zack’s (reasonable, correct!) request; I should’ve done that in the first place and lose points for not doing so. Apologies, Zack.
Clarification: I didn’t think of that as a “request.” I was saying that according to my standards, I would be embarrassed to publish criticism of someone that didn’t quote or link to their writings, and that it seemed to me to be in tension with your condemnations of strawmanning.
I don’t think of that as a request that you change it, because in general, I don’t think I have “jurisdiction” over other people’s writing. If someone says something I think is wrong, my response is to write my own comment or post explaining why I think it’s wrong (or perhaps mention it in person at Less Online), which they can respond or not-respond to as they see fit. You don’t owe me anything!
I haven’t thought that much about how I feel about this kind of thing in general, but in this case it seems clear that that section is definitely compatible with Zack’s norms, and so it feels in that context totally fine to me (I haven’t thought much about how I would feel about it for other people).
Um, I strong-upvoted and strong-agreement-voted Alexei’s comment.
Given our history of communication failures, I think your comments would be better if you try to avoid making claims about what I believe in the absence of direct textual evidence, in accordance with the Seventh Guideline.
But, crucially, that’s me saying I think your comments would be better comments if you did that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to extrapolate my views if you want to. You don’t owe me anything!
(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.