none of you pointed out that Caledonian’s original ‘objection’ - “It’s not logically necessary for ducks’ and robins’ disease transmissions to be symmetrical!”—was explicitly pointed out by me in the original text
I noticed, went back to your post to check my recollection and would have pointed it out, but my memory is not good enough to eliminate the possibility that you changed the post after Caledonian’s erroneous criticism.
Comments on this page by Bob, Sean, Pyramid Head, Eliezer and I all present a common description of Caledonian’s behavior: he raises objections that do not contribute anything because they are either trivial and ought to be corrected silently by the reader in the normal process of blog reading or are not valid at all. Not all his objections are this way, but more than half of them are. Also, the shrillness of his objections and his generalizations from those objections have caused me to go back and check the original post not only on this page but on many other pages, and I am a little angry that I wasted my time that way. My guess is that other people feel the same way. Also, I worry that his continuing this way will encourage other sloppy shrill comments from other individuals with the result that the comments on this blog will become less worth reading.
To prevent the perception that I am ignoring contrary evidence, I point out that in one
recentexchange Caledonian retracted an invalid objection to something Eliezer wrote. I hope he learns to do that more often. Of course the ideal would be for him to do it silently before posting the original objection.
none of you pointed out that Caledonian’s original ‘objection’ - “It’s not logically necessary for ducks’ and robins’ disease transmissions to be symmetrical!”—was explicitly pointed out by me in the original text
I noticed, went back to your post to check my recollection and would have pointed it out, but my memory is not good enough to eliminate the possibility that you changed the post after Caledonian’s erroneous criticism.
Comments on this page by Bob, Sean, Pyramid Head, Eliezer and I all present a common description of Caledonian’s behavior: he raises objections that do not contribute anything because they are either trivial and ought to be corrected silently by the reader in the normal process of blog reading or are not valid at all. Not all his objections are this way, but more than half of them are. Also, the shrillness of his objections and his generalizations from those objections have caused me to go back and check the original post not only on this page but on many other pages, and I am a little angry that I wasted my time that way. My guess is that other people feel the same way. Also, I worry that his continuing this way will encourage other sloppy shrill comments from other individuals with the result that the comments on this blog will become less worth reading.
To prevent the perception that I am ignoring contrary evidence, I point out that in one recent exchange Caledonian retracted an invalid objection to something Eliezer wrote. I hope he learns to do that more often. Of course the ideal would be for him to do it silently before posting the original objection.