(I want to preface this all with “I don’t think the thing Wei Dai did was particularly bad, I’m getting into the details here because there are nuances that I do think should ultimately part of a good truthseeking culture, although I think given Wei Dai’s previous track record Tsvi should ideally have put more effort into talking things through before banning and ideally found another solution. Right now authors don’t have a tool for issuing like a 1-day-cooloff sorta ban, which I think would have been more appropriate.”)
Object level, I mostly agree with Richard Ngo’s comment. But, where Richard says:
The phrase “Also, another part of my motivation is still valid and I think it would be interesting to try to answer” is a clear enough acknowledgement of a distinct line of inquiry that I no longer consider that comment to be a continuation of the “charge of the hobby-horse”.
I think that line diminishes the hobby-horse-charging-ness, but, doesn’t resolve it (I’m not sure I’d count it as even cutting the hobby-horse-ness by 50%). Like, Wei Dai says:
Ok, it looks like part of my motivation for going down this line of thought was based on a misunderstanding. But to be fair, in this post after you asked...
I think it’s generally a good yellow-flag-to-notice yourself saying “okay, yeah, I was wrong about that, but, to be fair” and then launch into a continued argument, having only briefly acknowledged the misunderstanding. It doesn’t look like you really “took the update”. When I find myself doing this sort of thing, I am usually look back and feel a bit embarrassed, realizing I really hadn’t thought about the implications of being-mistaken-about-the-first-part. The “to be fair” part is not actually as fair as you think.
I think Tsvi was fairly reasonably interpreting your comment as “I am going to continue all the momentum I had from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-disagreement and funnel into into more conversation that won’t really be a separate conversation from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-bit.”
The sort of thing I’d have wanted to see, if I were Tsvi, is… not even an apology like Richard suggested, but more demonstration of explicitly re-looking over the past conversation in light of realizing it was misunderstanding-fueled, and re-evaluate it in light of that, before continuing on to the next thing.
(I want to preface this all with “I don’t think the thing Wei Dai did was particularly bad, I’m getting into the details here because there are nuances that I do think should ultimately part of a good truthseeking culture, although I think given Wei Dai’s previous track record Tsvi should ideally have put more effort into talking things through before banning and ideally found another solution. Right now authors don’t have a tool for issuing like a 1-day-cooloff sorta ban, which I think would have been more appropriate.”)
Object level, I mostly agree with Richard Ngo’s comment. But, where Richard says:
I think that line diminishes the hobby-horse-charging-ness, but, doesn’t resolve it (I’m not sure I’d count it as even cutting the hobby-horse-ness by 50%). Like, Wei Dai says:
I think it’s generally a good yellow-flag-to-notice yourself saying “okay, yeah, I was wrong about that, but, to be fair” and then launch into a continued argument, having only briefly acknowledged the misunderstanding. It doesn’t look like you really “took the update”. When I find myself doing this sort of thing, I am usually look back and feel a bit embarrassed, realizing I really hadn’t thought about the implications of being-mistaken-about-the-first-part. The “to be fair” part is not actually as fair as you think.
I think Tsvi was fairly reasonably interpreting your comment as “I am going to continue all the momentum I had from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-disagreement and funnel into into more conversation that won’t really be a separate conversation from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-bit.”
The sort of thing I’d have wanted to see, if I were Tsvi, is… not even an apology like Richard suggested, but more demonstration of explicitly re-looking over the past conversation in light of realizing it was misunderstanding-fueled, and re-evaluate it in light of that, before continuing on to the next thing.
(I’m not reading this super-duper carefully due to general heartache but I think I basically agree with each and every thing Raemon says here.)