and so it is ineffective for large classes of readers, including specifically me and the other authors you’ve clashed with
The first half of this talks about readers, but the second half gives examples of authors. I think this is a rather important difference. In fact, it’s absolutely critical to the particular issue being discussed.
Of course many authors do not view Said’s comments positively; after all, he constantly points out that what they are writing is nonsense. But the main value Said provides at the meta-level (beyond the object-level of whether he is right or wrong, which I believe he usually but not always is) is in providing needed criticism for the readers of posts to digest.
There was a comment once by a popular LW user (maybe @Wei Dai?) who said that because he wants the time he spends on LW to be limited, his strategy is as follows: read the title and skim an outline of the post, then immediately go to the comment section to see if there are any highly-rated comments that debunk the core argument of the post and which don’t have adequate responses by the author. Only if there are no such comments does he actually go back and read the post closely, since this is a hard-to-fake signal that the post is actually high-quality.
In the spirit of Lonely Dissent, even one user stepping up and saying The Emperor Has No Clothes is sometimes sufficient for previously unstated disagreements with a post to come to light.
In the spirit of Lonely Dissent, even one user stepping up and saying The Emperor Has No Clothes is sometimes sufficient for previously unstated disagreements with a post to come to light.
Then let it be a user who can do so in a way that is sufficiently kind and curious that the comment is not a mere attempt at refutation but an invitation to discussion.
When I see most of Said’s comments (and here I’m necessarily mostly talking about his comments on other people’s posts), I think that they are on net bad. They smash applause lights. They don’t dig into the details. They respond to surface level details that often skip over why the author is trying to explore a topic because, as I read him, he often disagrees that there is any question to be addressed because it already has an answer he agrees with, and rather that try to engage the author in a discussion to convince them, he registers this disagreement in a way designed to shut down rather than start a discussion that might lead to changed minds. Any amount of usefulness from dissent his comments offer is, at least for me, offset by their manner of delivery.
I don’t see Less Wrong as a place for his style of comments, but he clearly does. It’s why I think the crux of Said and my disagreement is that we fundamentally disagree about what appropriate commenting norms are on Less Wrong. Everything else seems to be downstream of this disagreement, including my distress at dealing with Said’s comments on my posts.
Again, I welcome and encourage dissent on my posts. Please, if you think I am wrong, tell me why I am wrong. But do so in a way that invites engagement. I don’t see Less Wrong as a place for ideas to battle, but a place for curious people to work together to better understand the world, and that means not just creating a written record of competing claims and their evaluation, but also an attempt to convince people who we believe hold wrong beliefs to come to hold less wrong beliefs, since otherwise Less Wrong would be nothing but a pretty artifact that had no effect on the world.
The first half of this talks about readers, but the second half gives examples of authors. I think this is a rather important difference. In fact, it’s absolutely critical to the particular issue being discussed.
Of course many authors do not view Said’s comments positively; after all, he constantly points out that what they are writing is nonsense. But the main value Said provides at the meta-level (beyond the object-level of whether he is right or wrong, which I believe he usually but not always is) is in providing needed criticism for the readers of posts to digest.
There was a comment once by a popular LW user (maybe @Wei Dai?) who said that because he wants the time he spends on LW to be limited, his strategy is as follows: read the title and skim an outline of the post, then immediately go to the comment section to see if there are any highly-rated comments that debunk the core argument of the post and which don’t have adequate responses by the author. Only if there are no such comments does he actually go back and read the post closely, since this is a hard-to-fake signal that the post is actually high-quality.
In the spirit of Lonely Dissent, even one user stepping up and saying The Emperor Has No Clothes is sometimes sufficient for previously unstated disagreements with a post to come to light.
Then let it be a user who can do so in a way that is sufficiently kind and curious that the comment is not a mere attempt at refutation but an invitation to discussion.
When I see most of Said’s comments (and here I’m necessarily mostly talking about his comments on other people’s posts), I think that they are on net bad. They smash applause lights. They don’t dig into the details. They respond to surface level details that often skip over why the author is trying to explore a topic because, as I read him, he often disagrees that there is any question to be addressed because it already has an answer he agrees with, and rather that try to engage the author in a discussion to convince them, he registers this disagreement in a way designed to shut down rather than start a discussion that might lead to changed minds. Any amount of usefulness from dissent his comments offer is, at least for me, offset by their manner of delivery.
I don’t see Less Wrong as a place for his style of comments, but he clearly does. It’s why I think the crux of Said and my disagreement is that we fundamentally disagree about what appropriate commenting norms are on Less Wrong. Everything else seems to be downstream of this disagreement, including my distress at dealing with Said’s comments on my posts.
Again, I welcome and encourage dissent on my posts. Please, if you think I am wrong, tell me why I am wrong. But do so in a way that invites engagement. I don’t see Less Wrong as a place for ideas to battle, but a place for curious people to work together to better understand the world, and that means not just creating a written record of competing claims and their evaluation, but also an attempt to convince people who we believe hold wrong beliefs to come to hold less wrong beliefs, since otherwise Less Wrong would be nothing but a pretty artifact that had no effect on the world.