Oh, I’d say it didn’t. At least not to me, and judging from my memory of the comments, not to many others either.
That is, when I read the essay I thought: “Zack thinks that Oli and Duncan think X, and Zack thinks X is wrong. I think instead Oli and Duncan think X’, which is obviously true.”
Judging from this comment, you actually thought Oli and Duncan think X’, and you think X’ is wrong. And sure, after reading the essay I thought “Oli and Duncan think X’”, so arguably the essay transmitted that to me. But it felt more like the essay pointed me in a direction that let me generate the hypothesis myself, rather than actually transmitting the hypothesis to me.
Not sure if this is particularly a meaningful distinction.
Different in what respect?
This is kind of hard to answer because the distributions overlap, but they still seem like clearly different distributions to me. For example:
If I’m writing a post-like-thing, I need to come up with a topic, and I might change the topic half way through writing it. If I’m writing a comment-like-thing, I’m continuing with the topic that someone else started.
Post-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that I’ve picked myself is true/useful, comment-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that someone else picked is false/useless-or-harmful.
I’m more likely to try to come up with an analogy when writing a post-like-thing, and more likely to dive into an analogy when writing a comment-like-thing.
A post-like-thing usually can’t assume any one specific text as background knowledge. A comment-like-thing can typically assume the reader’s also read the thing I’m commenting on and knows the argument it’s making.
A post-like-thing is more likely to be written in the form of “fiction that communicates an idea” than a comment-like-thing is.
Hypothesis: even when you (i.e. Zack) write top-level posts, they’re typically towards the comment-like side of things, and that’s part of why it’s not clear to you that there’s a difference. For example, this top-level post is fairly comment-like.
It doesn’t need to, but should it?
Meh, not a conversation I feel like having.
To reiterate: you made an obviously-wrong argument for an obviously-wrong conclusion. (“For a given comment, the same bytes are written to the database regardless of the author. So the text screens off the author; that is, given the text, the effect on the reader can’t change depending on the author.”) And you know the conclusion is wrong, but you still left the wrong argument in the text, without pointing out where the mistake was or even that there must be a mistake, and that bugged me.
This isn’t necessarily a flaw in the post, but I felt like pointing at it and grumbling anyway.
Oh, I’d say it didn’t. At least not to me, and judging from my memory of the comments, not to many others either.
That is, when I read the essay I thought: “Zack thinks that Oli and Duncan think X, and Zack thinks X is wrong. I think instead Oli and Duncan think X’, which is obviously true.”
Judging from this comment, you actually thought Oli and Duncan think X’, and you think X’ is wrong. And sure, after reading the essay I thought “Oli and Duncan think X’”, so arguably the essay transmitted that to me. But it felt more like the essay pointed me in a direction that let me generate the hypothesis myself, rather than actually transmitting the hypothesis to me.
Not sure if this is particularly a meaningful distinction.
This is kind of hard to answer because the distributions overlap, but they still seem like clearly different distributions to me. For example:
If I’m writing a post-like-thing, I need to come up with a topic, and I might change the topic half way through writing it. If I’m writing a comment-like-thing, I’m continuing with the topic that someone else started.
Post-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that I’ve picked myself is true/useful, comment-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that someone else picked is false/useless-or-harmful.
I’m more likely to try to come up with an analogy when writing a post-like-thing, and more likely to dive into an analogy when writing a comment-like-thing.
A post-like-thing usually can’t assume any one specific text as background knowledge. A comment-like-thing can typically assume the reader’s also read the thing I’m commenting on and knows the argument it’s making.
A post-like-thing is more likely to be written in the form of “fiction that communicates an idea” than a comment-like-thing is.
Hypothesis: even when you (i.e. Zack) write top-level posts, they’re typically towards the comment-like side of things, and that’s part of why it’s not clear to you that there’s a difference. For example, this top-level post is fairly comment-like.
Meh, not a conversation I feel like having.
To reiterate: you made an obviously-wrong argument for an obviously-wrong conclusion. (“For a given comment, the same bytes are written to the database regardless of the author. So the text screens off the author; that is, given the text, the effect on the reader can’t change depending on the author.”) And you know the conclusion is wrong, but you still left the wrong argument in the text, without pointing out where the mistake was or even that there must be a mistake, and that bugged me.
This isn’t necessarily a flaw in the post, but I felt like pointing at it and grumbling anyway.