I agree with your main point that authors are not obligated to respond to comments, but—
I don’t know whose judgement you would trust on this, but if I drag Eliezer into this thread, and have him say decisively that the norms of LessWrong should not put an obligation on authors to respond to every question, and to be presumed wrong or ignorant in the absence of a response, would that change your mind on this?
Why would this kind of appeal-to-authority change his mind? (That was a rhetorical question; I wouldn’t expect you to reply to this comment unless you really wanted to.) Said thinks his position is justified by normatively correct general principles. If he’s wrong, he’s wrong because of some counterargument that normative general principles don’t actually work like that, not because of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s say-so.
Said has in the past many times expressed an interest in following the rules of different spaces, even if he disagrees with them, out of a general consideration that it’s good for spaces to establish their own rules and have their own local norms. At least that’s the sense I’ve gotten from him in the discussions we’ve had about Archipelago.
I agree that one way to resolve this discussion would be to come to agreement on the underlying normative principles (which would be great, but might take a lot of time), but I think another plausible path (which strikes me as more likely to succeed in a timely manner), is to get agreement on what kind of norms the users on LessWrong would generally prefer, in combination with a general argument that it’s usually better to have slightly worse norms that people agree on, than to be in constant dispute and limbo between different sets of norms.
In addition to that, I think a lot of users on LessWrong trust Eliezer to be a person to set a lot of the norms and culture of the site, so I expect his opinion to be a lot (though by no means decisive) evidence of what norms people would want for the site (and I also assign significant probability that Said would broadly agree that Eliezer would be a relatively fair person to decide on the norms).
Said has in the past many times expressed an interest in following the rules of different spaces, even if he disagrees with them, out of a general consideration that it’s good for spaces to establish their own rules and have their own local norms. At least that’s the sense I’ve gotten from him in the discussions we’ve had about Archipelago.
I agree with your main point that authors are not obligated to respond to comments, but—
Why would this kind of appeal-to-authority change his mind? (That was a rhetorical question; I wouldn’t expect you to reply to this comment unless you really wanted to.) Said thinks his position is justified by normatively correct general principles. If he’s wrong, he’s wrong because of some counterargument that normative general principles don’t actually work like that, not because of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s say-so.
Said has in the past many times expressed an interest in following the rules of different spaces, even if he disagrees with them, out of a general consideration that it’s good for spaces to establish their own rules and have their own local norms. At least that’s the sense I’ve gotten from him in the discussions we’ve had about Archipelago.
I agree that one way to resolve this discussion would be to come to agreement on the underlying normative principles (which would be great, but might take a lot of time), but I think another plausible path (which strikes me as more likely to succeed in a timely manner), is to get agreement on what kind of norms the users on LessWrong would generally prefer, in combination with a general argument that it’s usually better to have slightly worse norms that people agree on, than to be in constant dispute and limbo between different sets of norms.
In addition to that, I think a lot of users on LessWrong trust Eliezer to be a person to set a lot of the norms and culture of the site, so I expect his opinion to be a lot (though by no means decisive) evidence of what norms people would want for the site (and I also assign significant probability that Said would broadly agree that Eliezer would be a relatively fair person to decide on the norms).
Yes, I endorse this (and your second paragraph).
Re: the third paragraph—see my other comment.