I think it’s important to be able to point out dynamics that feel unsettling and unhealthy without necessarily being able to pin down exactly what’s wrong. I think it can often be hard to point out what’s wrong, and demanding people explain themselves well in public is often unfair.
That said, the circumstances that normally make me willing to cut-slack-for-bad-argumentation here don’t obviously apply to CellBioGuy.
I also think it’s important to not reflexively shut down people disagreeing with the LW site vague-community-consensus.
That said, the comments here just pretty clearly don’t pass muster as acceptable LW comments in the general case. The amount of slack I’m willing to cut them isn’t infinite (and basically has been used up by this point). If you want to repeatedly argue we’re just a spiraling cult you do need to, at a minimum, supply any argumentation whatsoever, and engage with some object level claims. It’s easy to toss scary sounding labels around.
I liked gears to ascension’s reply, which sort of took seriously the concerns CellBioGuy was pointing at while trying to say something substantive about it.
You’ve been saying a lot of things in this reference class in the past week (i.e. vague cult accusations without making substantive claims), and if that keeps up we’ll probably take some kind of mod action about it, although I haven’t thought it through that much at this point.
Commenting with my mod hat on:
I think it’s important to be able to point out dynamics that feel unsettling and unhealthy without necessarily being able to pin down exactly what’s wrong. I think it can often be hard to point out what’s wrong, and demanding people explain themselves well in public is often unfair.
That said, the circumstances that normally make me willing to cut-slack-for-bad-argumentation here don’t obviously apply to CellBioGuy.
I also think it’s important to not reflexively shut down people disagreeing with the LW site vague-community-consensus.
That said, the comments here just pretty clearly don’t pass muster as acceptable LW comments in the general case. The amount of slack I’m willing to cut them isn’t infinite (and basically has been used up by this point). If you want to repeatedly argue we’re just a spiraling cult you do need to, at a minimum, supply any argumentation whatsoever, and engage with some object level claims. It’s easy to toss scary sounding labels around.
I liked gears to ascension’s reply, which sort of took seriously the concerns CellBioGuy was pointing at while trying to say something substantive about it.
You’ve been saying a lot of things in this reference class in the past week (i.e. vague cult accusations without making substantive claims), and if that keeps up we’ll probably take some kind of mod action about it, although I haven’t thought it through that much at this point.