I’m going to stand by the “framing as a correction” in my initial comment on “There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)”. (The “sorry” in my final comment was intended as a sympathy-for-not-loving-how-the-thread-ended-up-playing-out sorry—it was just not a great thread for several reasons—not an admission-of-wrongdoing sorry.)
What I took issue with in the post was the conjunction of a recommendation to “Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary” and an endorsement of “The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories”. I claim that this was substantively misleading readers about the cognitive function of categorization. I think that was a real flaw in the post that I had a legitimate interest in pointing out, and I’d do it again.
It’s true that my comment was somewhat tangential to the main thesis of the post. Eukaryote was primarily trying to share some cool Tree Facts, not push a philosophy-of-language thesis. I don’t think that bears on the propriety of my comment. If in the course of trying to share Tree Facts, you end up accidentally saying something substantively misleading about the philosophy of language, you should expect a comment from your local philosophy of language specialist.
(In the same way, if in the course of trying to push my philosophy of language thesis, I accidentally end up saying something misleading about trees, I expect a comment from my local tree specialist. I promise not to take it personally, because I know it’s not about me and my intent: it’s about having a maximally accurate shared map of trees. It’s good for specialists to comment on flaws in a post, even if they’re tangential to the post’s main thesis, because then people who read the comments can be better informed about that tangential point. It shouldn’t detract from other comment threads discussing the main thesis of the post; we’re not going to run out of paper.)
It’s true that after I explained how I think the cognitive function of categorization bears on the question of trees, Eukaryote wrote that “it doesn’t sound like we disagree” and that I was “over-extrapolating what [she] meant by arbitrary”. I don’t think that bears on the propriety of my comment. When I leave a comment on a post, I’m commenting on the text of the post, not the author’s private belief-state (which I obviously don’t have access to). If it turns out the author actually agrees with my comment, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad comment unless it was already clear from the post that the author would agree.
It’s true that my comment was somewhat tangential to the main thesis of the post. Eukaryote was primarily trying to share some cool Tree Facts, not push a philosophy-of-language thesis. I don’t think that bears on the propriety of my comment.
I agree, and said as much in the post (in general terms) in the conclusion.
I don’t think that bears on the propriety of my comment. When I leave a comment on a post, I’m commenting on the text of the post, not the author’s private belief-state (which I obviously don’t have access to).
This is pretty absurd, but I’m sure you’ve litigated this point many times, so I assume there’s little reason for me to try to get you to see something new here. So it’s at least hinted somewhere, there’s a relevant difference between responding to [the text where someone makes their case repeatedly in detail] vs. [the text where someone makes a very tangential point in one phrase or sentence and doesn’t elaborate on their position]. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that you pick up on tangential points. This would be predicted by “Zack is looking for words that he can then respond to by talking about his hobby horse”. Which again would be fine! I think you yourself have done this in perfectly fine ways! But I think for example you should be clear about when you’re doing this, including about how you’re not really trying to dialogue with the author’s intent; or if you are trying to do that, then you can just take a sentence to check what they think. It’s good practice anyway to state the position you’re critiquing. So then you can just ask the author “is this roughly what you think?”. Then they could say yes or no or a more nuanced answer or “IDK but I don’t feel like talking about that”.
Even if you are (or claim) to be only responding to text, just as though it were LLM-generated text that someone happened to post (and got a lot of attention that you perhaps wanted to piggyback off of?), you can maybe understand that usually other people are making guesses at the author’s belief-state (which is not private, since they have written from it), and then trying to dialogue with that belief-state e.g. in the comments on that post, so it makes sense that authors might presume that commenters are doing that.
also that’s how discourse ought to work oki byeeeee
I don’t see what good option you’re offering Zack, given the discursive environment.
If everyone is unreflectively endorsing harmful nonsense A and referencing a canonical case for A, it makes sense to FIRST argue against the canonical case. But if people keep behaving as though they hadn’t read the argument and endorsing A anyway, the options are:
1 Assume good faith, treat this as evidence of ignorance, and try to point them to the correction.
2 Infer bad faith and try to recruit others to invalidate this vice-signaling.
3 Give up and go away.
Seems like Zack’s doing 1, and I’ve done a mixture. I understand that 3 is the rational option in most contexts these days, but this is the RATIONALITY forum, what exactly is Zack supposed to do here? What’s the point of any of this if Zack’s behavior is unwelcome?
While there really are hobbyhorses in the sense you describe, they are mild inconveniences (trivial in a written medium) like a bore talking about train schedules on the flimsiest pretext. The use you’re making of the idea here just seems like a projection. There’s some shared sense of entitlement to speak without being accountable to certain sorts of criticisms, and the perceived injury of accountability is being projected onto those trying to hold members of this class accountable.
The use you’re making of the idea here just seems like a projection. There’s some shared sense of entitlement to speak without being accountable to certain sorts of criticisms, and the perceived injury of accountability is being projected onto those trying to hold members of this class accountable.
Can you clarify about this “entitlement to speak without being accountable” that I supposedly have?
Are you tracking that I’ve repeatedly said there’s nothing wrong per se with making nitpicks, tangential comments, criticisms, etc.?
You banned Wei for articulating what to all appearances was a good-faith objection, and wrote a blog post advertising this as though you expected people to side with you.
You reported the impression that you had the subjective sense it ought to have been easy to find an example of Zack behaving badly, but had some difficulty finding an example you found satisfactory. My impression is that this is a pretty common response to Zack’s criticism: there’s no specific complaint on Gricean or similar grounds (it’s not actually irrelevant, untrue, or unimportant), but there’s a sense that one ought to have standing to nonspecifically complain about him because one expects others to share a sense that his criticisms are unwelcome, and to side with the complainer.
It seems like because Scott’s politically central in the local social cluster, people feel entitled to approvingly cite his blog post on categories no matter how clearly someone politically marginal explains the problems with it, and for this to be considered a free, default, noncontentious action, like referring to the clear daytime sky as blue, or 2+2=4. But taken literally this behavior is making an important false claim, so objecting to it is always justified on Gricean grounds.
For people who feel entitled to accountability from other speakers, and obliged to account for their own claims, the obvious remedy to these annoyances is for people to stop approvingly citing bad arguments. The sense that instead Zack ought to stop complaining seem like it reflects a (presumptively shared) sense of entitlement not to be bothered when you’re being normal, regardless of the literal implications of what you say.
This seems inconsistent with your explicit statement that criticisms and even nitpicks are “okay.” I was trying to explain the behavior I observed, not the different preferences described.
You banned Wei for articulating what to all appearances was a good-faith objection
No, I banned him for the pattern I described in this post, which is fabricating a disagreement and ignoring clarification about that false disagreement in order to talk about his thing.
You reported the impression that you had the subjective sense it ought to have been easy to find an example of Zack behaving badly, but had some difficulty finding an example you found satisfactory. My impression is that this is a pretty common response to Zack’s criticism: there’s no specific complaint on Gricean or similar grounds (it’s not actually irrelevant, untrue, or unimportant), but there’s a sense that one ought to have standing to nonspecifically complain about him because one expects others to share a sense that his criticisms are unwelcome, and to side with the complainer.
...But I did find an example fairly easily, and described it, it just wasn’t the first couple top-voted comments.
It’s perhaps not a coincidence that you pick up on tangential points. This would be predicted by “Zack is looking for words that he can then respond to by talking about his hobby horse”.
It’s definitely not a coincidence; it’s just that I think of it as, “Zack is looking for common errors that he is unusually sensitive to and therefore in a good position to correct.”
I try to keep my contributions relevant, and I think I’m applying a significantly higher standard than mere “words that [I] can then respond to.” There have been occasions when a “hobbyhorse-like” reply comes to mind, and then I notice that it’s not sufficiently relevant in context, and I don’t post those ones.
you are (or claim) to be only responding to text
Sorry, I should refine this. It’s not that belief-states are irrelevant. It’s that I don’t think I’m “liable” for making reasonable inferences about belief-states from the text that sometimes turn out to be wrong. See below.
then you can just take a sentence to check what they think. It’s good practice anyway to state the position you’re critiquing. So then you can just ask the author “is this roughly what you think?”. Then they could say yes or no or a more nuanced answer or “IDK but I don’t feel like talking about that”.
I think “Explicitly confirm authorial intent before criticizing” is not a good practice for an async public forum, because it adds way too much friction to the publication of valuable criticisms. (Confirming intent seems good in syncronous conversations, where it’s not as costly for the discussion process to block waiting for the author’s Yes/No/IDK.)
In the example under consideration, when someone says, verbatim, “Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary”, and describes ”… Not Man for the Categories” as “timeless”, I think it’s pretty reasonable for me to infer on the basis of the text that the author is probably confused about the cognitive function of categorization in the way that Scott Alexander is confused, and for me to explain the problem. I don’t think it would be an improvement for me to say “Just checking, are you saying you endorse Scott Alexander’s views on the cognitive function of categorization?”, then wait hours or days for them to say Yes/No/IDK, then explain the problem if and only if they say Yes.
Maybe you’re not suggesting I should wait for the response, but merely that I should rephrase my comment to start with a question—to say, “Is X your view? If so, that’s wrong because Y. If not, disregard” rather than “X is wrong because Y”? I think I do something similar to that pretty often. (For example, by including this paragraph starting with “Maybe you’re not suggesting [...]” rather than ending the present comment with the previous paragraph.) I think I would have to take some time to introspect and look over my comment history to try to reverse-engineer what criteria my brain is using to choose which approach.
I try to keep my contributions relevant, and I think I’m applying a significantly higher standard than mere “words that [I] can then respond to.”
AFAIK, that’s accurate.
I would say the off-topicness of the hobby horse is not actually the central problem with a charging hobby horse. The central problem would be simply persistently misunderstanding the author.
This is made worse by being framed as a correction, because it’s a kind of challenge—a high-salience push for engagement. Which is perfectly fine to make, but IMO you should then be trying to correct the author’s actual opinions. In the Tree thread, you respond to written words, which makes sense; but then you are pretty slow to question the background philosophical stance that you’ve imagined the author to have, which to me seems rude. Like, you can imagine a hostile TV interviewer having a guest on and being like “So why do you think it’s ok to kill babies?” and the guest is like “Of course I don’t think that, what I’m saying is that 3-week fetus has no neurons, so it’s not sentient, so it’s not a moral cost to abort” and the interviewer is like “I see. So why don’t you value human life?”. I mean your behavior is not very bad IMO, not like the TV interview, but it’s structurally similar. Does this make any sense?
The off-topicness is relevant for two reasons. First of all, it’s an additional annoyance, in that the author “is being dragged in” (whatever this should mean in context) to a topic that’s less of interest to them. Second of all, it’s relevant because hobby horses are a thing, and they tend to produce [persistent misunderstanding, perhaps framed as corrections], which then tend to also be off-topic since hobby horses tend to be off-topic.
I think “Explicitly confirm authorial intent before criticizing” is not a good practice for an async public forum, because it adds way too much friction to the publication of valuable criticisms. (Confirming intent seems good in syncronous conversations, where it’s not as costly for the discussion process to block waiting for the author’s Yes/No/IDK.)
That’s fair. Let me clarify: I’m not especially saying “ask and then wait”. Rather I’m suggesting for example that you state the position you’re arguing against; ask “Is that roughly what you think?”; and then continue with your response, maybe saying “If so:” or “Anyway, I’ll respond to that position I stated:”. You could add “I think so, because you wrote X” if you want. (I think this argues in favor of synchronous convos generally. Personally, I am much nicer in synchronous convos.) I’d also recommend
Keeping in mind that you might have misunderstood the author’s intent/positions, e.g. by imagining a position they don’t hold;
Updating quickly about their positions (of course I don’t mean be overcredulous, but.).
I would guess that you in particular put a lot of effort into this, so IDK if there’s an update you’re supposed to make. But I do think the specific example I used in the OP exhibits the pattern I describe.
Anyway:
Maybe I’d like to zoom out a bit. I’d probably leave this thread to rest, but it’s of course fair for you to want to hash out what if anything was objectionable about your comments in the Tree thread.
I’m going to stand by the “framing as a correction” in my initial comment on “There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)”. (The “sorry” in my final comment was intended as a sympathy-for-not-loving-how-the-thread-ended-up-playing-out sorry—it was just not a great thread for several reasons—not an admission-of-wrongdoing sorry.)
What I took issue with in the post was the conjunction of a recommendation to “Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary” and an endorsement of “The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories”. I claim that this was substantively misleading readers about the cognitive function of categorization. I think that was a real flaw in the post that I had a legitimate interest in pointing out, and I’d do it again.
It’s true that my comment was somewhat tangential to the main thesis of the post. Eukaryote was primarily trying to share some cool Tree Facts, not push a philosophy-of-language thesis. I don’t think that bears on the propriety of my comment. If in the course of trying to share Tree Facts, you end up accidentally saying something substantively misleading about the philosophy of language, you should expect a comment from your local philosophy of language specialist.
(In the same way, if in the course of trying to push my philosophy of language thesis, I accidentally end up saying something misleading about trees, I expect a comment from my local tree specialist. I promise not to take it personally, because I know it’s not about me and my intent: it’s about having a maximally accurate shared map of trees. It’s good for specialists to comment on flaws in a post, even if they’re tangential to the post’s main thesis, because then people who read the comments can be better informed about that tangential point. It shouldn’t detract from other comment threads discussing the main thesis of the post; we’re not going to run out of paper.)
It’s true that after I explained how I think the cognitive function of categorization bears on the question of trees, Eukaryote wrote that “it doesn’t sound like we disagree” and that I was “over-extrapolating what [she] meant by arbitrary”. I don’t think that bears on the propriety of my comment. When I leave a comment on a post, I’m commenting on the text of the post, not the author’s private belief-state (which I obviously don’t have access to). If it turns out the author actually agrees with my comment, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad comment unless it was already clear from the post that the author would agree.
I agree, and said as much in the post (in general terms) in the conclusion.
This is pretty absurd, but I’m sure you’ve litigated this point many times, so I assume there’s little reason for me to try to get you to see something new here. So it’s at least hinted somewhere, there’s a relevant difference between responding to [the text where someone makes their case repeatedly in detail] vs. [the text where someone makes a very tangential point in one phrase or sentence and doesn’t elaborate on their position]. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that you pick up on tangential points. This would be predicted by “Zack is looking for words that he can then respond to by talking about his hobby horse”. Which again would be fine! I think you yourself have done this in perfectly fine ways! But I think for example you should be clear about when you’re doing this, including about how you’re not really trying to dialogue with the author’s intent; or if you are trying to do that, then you can just take a sentence to check what they think. It’s good practice anyway to state the position you’re critiquing. So then you can just ask the author “is this roughly what you think?”. Then they could say yes or no or a more nuanced answer or “IDK but I don’t feel like talking about that”.
Even if you are (or claim) to be only responding to text, just as though it were LLM-generated text that someone happened to post (and got a lot of attention that you perhaps wanted to piggyback off of?), you can maybe understand that usually other people are making guesses at the author’s belief-state (which is not private, since they have written from it), and then trying to dialogue with that belief-state e.g. in the comments on that post, so it makes sense that authors might presume that commenters are doing that.
also that’s how discourse ought to work oki byeeeee
I don’t see what good option you’re offering Zack, given the discursive environment.
If everyone is unreflectively endorsing harmful nonsense A and referencing a canonical case for A, it makes sense to FIRST argue against the canonical case. But if people keep behaving as though they hadn’t read the argument and endorsing A anyway, the options are:
1 Assume good faith, treat this as evidence of ignorance, and try to point them to the correction.
2 Infer bad faith and try to recruit others to invalidate this vice-signaling.
3 Give up and go away.
Seems like Zack’s doing 1, and I’ve done a mixture. I understand that 3 is the rational option in most contexts these days, but this is the RATIONALITY forum, what exactly is Zack supposed to do here? What’s the point of any of this if Zack’s behavior is unwelcome?
While there really are hobbyhorses in the sense you describe, they are mild inconveniences (trivial in a written medium) like a bore talking about train schedules on the flimsiest pretext. The use you’re making of the idea here just seems like a projection. There’s some shared sense of entitlement to speak without being accountable to certain sorts of criticisms, and the perceived injury of accountability is being projected onto those trying to hold members of this class accountable.
Can you clarify about this “entitlement to speak without being accountable” that I supposedly have? Are you tracking that I’ve repeatedly said there’s nothing wrong per se with making nitpicks, tangential comments, criticisms, etc.?
You banned Wei for articulating what to all appearances was a good-faith objection, and wrote a blog post advertising this as though you expected people to side with you.
You reported the impression that you had the subjective sense it ought to have been easy to find an example of Zack behaving badly, but had some difficulty finding an example you found satisfactory. My impression is that this is a pretty common response to Zack’s criticism: there’s no specific complaint on Gricean or similar grounds (it’s not actually irrelevant, untrue, or unimportant), but there’s a sense that one ought to have standing to nonspecifically complain about him because one expects others to share a sense that his criticisms are unwelcome, and to side with the complainer.
It seems like because Scott’s politically central in the local social cluster, people feel entitled to approvingly cite his blog post on categories no matter how clearly someone politically marginal explains the problems with it, and for this to be considered a free, default, noncontentious action, like referring to the clear daytime sky as blue, or 2+2=4. But taken literally this behavior is making an important false claim, so objecting to it is always justified on Gricean grounds.
For people who feel entitled to accountability from other speakers, and obliged to account for their own claims, the obvious remedy to these annoyances is for people to stop approvingly citing bad arguments. The sense that instead Zack ought to stop complaining seem like it reflects a (presumptively shared) sense of entitlement not to be bothered when you’re being normal, regardless of the literal implications of what you say.
This seems inconsistent with your explicit statement that criticisms and even nitpicks are “okay.” I was trying to explain the behavior I observed, not the different preferences described.
No, I banned him for the pattern I described in this post, which is fabricating a disagreement and ignoring clarification about that false disagreement in order to talk about his thing.
...But I did find an example fairly easily, and described it, it just wasn’t the first couple top-voted comments.
It’s definitely not a coincidence; it’s just that I think of it as, “Zack is looking for common errors that he is unusually sensitive to and therefore in a good position to correct.”
I try to keep my contributions relevant, and I think I’m applying a significantly higher standard than mere “words that [I] can then respond to.” There have been occasions when a “hobbyhorse-like” reply comes to mind, and then I notice that it’s not sufficiently relevant in context, and I don’t post those ones.
Sorry, I should refine this. It’s not that belief-states are irrelevant. It’s that I don’t think I’m “liable” for making reasonable inferences about belief-states from the text that sometimes turn out to be wrong. See below.
I think “Explicitly confirm authorial intent before criticizing” is not a good practice for an async public forum, because it adds way too much friction to the publication of valuable criticisms. (Confirming intent seems good in syncronous conversations, where it’s not as costly for the discussion process to block waiting for the author’s Yes/No/IDK.)
In the example under consideration, when someone says, verbatim, “Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary”, and describes ”… Not Man for the Categories” as “timeless”, I think it’s pretty reasonable for me to infer on the basis of the text that the author is probably confused about the cognitive function of categorization in the way that Scott Alexander is confused, and for me to explain the problem. I don’t think it would be an improvement for me to say “Just checking, are you saying you endorse Scott Alexander’s views on the cognitive function of categorization?”, then wait hours or days for them to say Yes/No/IDK, then explain the problem if and only if they say Yes.
Maybe you’re not suggesting I should wait for the response, but merely that I should rephrase my comment to start with a question—to say, “Is X your view? If so, that’s wrong because Y. If not, disregard” rather than “X is wrong because Y”? I think I do something similar to that pretty often. (For example, by including this paragraph starting with “Maybe you’re not suggesting [...]” rather than ending the present comment with the previous paragraph.) I think I would have to take some time to introspect and look over my comment history to try to reverse-engineer what criteria my brain is using to choose which approach.
AFAIK, that’s accurate.
I would say the off-topicness of the hobby horse is not actually the central problem with a charging hobby horse. The central problem would be simply persistently misunderstanding the author.
This is made worse by being framed as a correction, because it’s a kind of challenge—a high-salience push for engagement. Which is perfectly fine to make, but IMO you should then be trying to correct the author’s actual opinions. In the Tree thread, you respond to written words, which makes sense; but then you are pretty slow to question the background philosophical stance that you’ve imagined the author to have, which to me seems rude. Like, you can imagine a hostile TV interviewer having a guest on and being like “So why do you think it’s ok to kill babies?” and the guest is like “Of course I don’t think that, what I’m saying is that 3-week fetus has no neurons, so it’s not sentient, so it’s not a moral cost to abort” and the interviewer is like “I see. So why don’t you value human life?”. I mean your behavior is not very bad IMO, not like the TV interview, but it’s structurally similar. Does this make any sense?
The off-topicness is relevant for two reasons. First of all, it’s an additional annoyance, in that the author “is being dragged in” (whatever this should mean in context) to a topic that’s less of interest to them. Second of all, it’s relevant because hobby horses are a thing, and they tend to produce [persistent misunderstanding, perhaps framed as corrections], which then tend to also be off-topic since hobby horses tend to be off-topic.
That’s fair. Let me clarify: I’m not especially saying “ask and then wait”. Rather I’m suggesting for example that you state the position you’re arguing against; ask “Is that roughly what you think?”; and then continue with your response, maybe saying “If so:” or “Anyway, I’ll respond to that position I stated:”. You could add “I think so, because you wrote X” if you want. (I think this argues in favor of synchronous convos generally. Personally, I am much nicer in synchronous convos.) I’d also recommend
Keeping in mind that you might have misunderstood the author’s intent/positions, e.g. by imagining a position they don’t hold;
Updating quickly about their positions (of course I don’t mean be overcredulous, but.).
I would guess that you in particular put a lot of effort into this, so IDK if there’s an update you’re supposed to make. But I do think the specific example I used in the OP exhibits the pattern I describe.
Anyway:
Maybe I’d like to zoom out a bit. I’d probably leave this thread to rest, but it’s of course fair for you to want to hash out what if anything was objectionable about your comments in the Tree thread.