This is important enough that you should clarify in your own words. Raymond Arnold, as a moderator of lesswrong.com, is it in fact your position that “what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff”?
The word and actual connotations of anal-retentive are important to my sentence. (Also, I said “this feels righter-to-me” not “this is right” and I definitely did not make an explicit defense of exactly this wording as aspirational policy)
We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff.
Some of those practices should include tracking various metaphorical forests-vs-trees, and being some-kind-of-intentional about what things are worth arguing in what sort of ways. (This does not come with any particular opinion about what sort of ways are worth arguing what sort of things, just, that there exist at least some patterns of nerdy pedantry that do not automatically get to be treated as actively good parts of a good truthseeking culture)
(I think this was fairly obvious and that you are indeed being kind of obnoxious so I have strong downvoted you in this instance)
You replied to a comment that said, verbatim, “what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff”, with, “This paragraph feels righter-to-me”.
That response does prompt the reader to wonder whether you believe the quoted statement by Malcolm McLeod, which was a prominent thesis sentence of the comment that you were endorsing as feeling righter-to-you! I understand that “This feels righter-to-me” does not mean the same thing as “This is right.” That’s why I asked you to clarify!
In your clarification, you have now disavowed the quoted statement with your own statement that “We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff.”
This paragraph feels righter-to-me (oh, huh, you even ended up with the same word “ostentatious” as pointer that I did in my comment-1-minute-ago)
This is important enough that you should clarify in your own words. Raymond Arnold, as a moderator of lesswrong.com, is it in fact your position that “what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff”?
The word and actual connotations of anal-retentive are important to my sentence. (Also, I said “this feels righter-to-me” not “this is right” and I definitely did not make an explicit defense of exactly this wording as aspirational policy)
We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff.
Some of those practices should include tracking various metaphorical forests-vs-trees, and being some-kind-of-intentional about what things are worth arguing in what sort of ways. (This does not come with any particular opinion about what sort of ways are worth arguing what sort of things, just, that there exist at least some patterns of nerdy pedantry that do not automatically get to be treated as actively good parts of a good truthseeking culture)
(I think this was fairly obvious and that you are indeed being kind of obnoxious so I have strong downvoted you in this instance)
Thank you for clarifying.
No, it was not obvious!
You replied to a comment that said, verbatim, “what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff”, with, “This paragraph feels righter-to-me”.
That response does prompt the reader to wonder whether you believe the quoted statement by Malcolm McLeod, which was a prominent thesis sentence of the comment that you were endorsing as feeling righter-to-you! I understand that “This feels righter-to-me” does not mean the same thing as “This is right.” That’s why I asked you to clarify!
In your clarification, you have now disavowed the quoted statement with your own statement that “We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff.”
I emphatically agree with your statement for the reasons I explained at length in such posts as “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think” and “Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists”, but I don’t think the matter is “fairly obvious.” If it were, I wouldn’t have had to write thousands of words about it.