This seems somewhat backwards to me. Communication is kind of like a tree search of meaning. Everything you say is full of ambiguity and you can spend more words clarifying them by choosing specific nodes of the tree. To dig into this means you need to prioritise which bits are important, you can’t make everything precise. I generally disapprove of critiquing people who don’t put in the effort to clearly communicate a thing that was clearly unimportant to that point and I view the sloppiness defence as saying that “you are making an implicit argument that this thing is low quality because it has an error. However, the error is in a part of the tree that wasn’t very relevant for the arguments. So who cares”
Separately, there is someone who supports their case with reasoning that is invalid and ambiguity defends them from people making this critique. But there, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the updated argument does not support the conclusion, so sloppiness is irrelevant—their argument is invalid
Maybe there’s a gray zone where the detail seems plausibly relevant to a reader but actually isn’t? Critique seems reasonable here.
I don’t know which category the Bengio thing falls into—it seems like it makes an invalid argument to support a specific point in its overall thesis? I haven’t read it
This seems somewhat backwards to me. Communication is kind of like a tree search of meaning. Everything you say is full of ambiguity and you can spend more words clarifying them by choosing specific nodes of the tree. To dig into this means you need to prioritise which bits are important, you can’t make everything precise. I generally disapprove of critiquing people who don’t put in the effort to clearly communicate a thing that was clearly unimportant to that point and I view the sloppiness defence as saying that “you are making an implicit argument that this thing is low quality because it has an error. However, the error is in a part of the tree that wasn’t very relevant for the arguments. So who cares”
Separately, there is someone who supports their case with reasoning that is invalid and ambiguity defends them from people making this critique. But there, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the updated argument does not support the conclusion, so sloppiness is irrelevant—their argument is invalid
Maybe there’s a gray zone where the detail seems plausibly relevant to a reader but actually isn’t? Critique seems reasonable here.
I don’t know which category the Bengio thing falls into—it seems like it makes an invalid argument to support a specific point in its overall thesis? I haven’t read it