I don’t mind people forming hypotheses, as long as they flag that what they’ve got is a hypothesis.
I don’t like it when people sort of … skim social points off the top? They launch a social attack with the veneer that it’s just a hypothesis (“What, am I not allowed to have models and guesses?”), but (as gjm pointed out in that subthread) they don’t actually respond to information, and update. Observably, Said was pretending to represent a reasonable prior, but then refusing to move to a posterior.
That’s the part I don’t like. If you gamble with someone else’s reputation and prove wrong, you should lose, somehow; it shouldn’t be a free action to insinuate negative things about another person and just walk away scot-free if they were all false and unjustified.
Not sure if this is a crux, but my impression is Said in particular is not accruing social credit for his comments. I agree that other people pulling similar maneuvers probably do, and that’s often bad, but my impression is Said in particular has just gone too far.
He was successful enough that Vaniver took it seriously and, in a highly upvoted comment on this thread, fell for what I believe is a privileging-the-hypothesis gambit (details above under Vaniver’s comment).
I don’t mind people forming hypotheses, as long as they flag that what they’ve got is a hypothesis.
I don’t like it when people sort of … skim social points off the top? They launch a social attack with the veneer that it’s just a hypothesis (“What, am I not allowed to have models and guesses?”), but (as gjm pointed out in that subthread) they don’t actually respond to information, and update. Observably, Said was pretending to represent a reasonable prior, but then refusing to move to a posterior.
That’s the part I don’t like. If you gamble with someone else’s reputation and prove wrong, you should lose, somehow; it shouldn’t be a free action to insinuate negative things about another person and just walk away scot-free if they were all false and unjustified.
Not sure if this is a crux, but my impression is Said in particular is not accruing social credit for his comments. I agree that other people pulling similar maneuvers probably do, and that’s often bad, but my impression is Said in particular has just gone too far.
He was successful enough that Vaniver took it seriously and, in a highly upvoted comment on this thread, fell for what I believe is a privileging-the-hypothesis gambit (details above under Vaniver’s comment).
Thanks, I retract the comment
More on this here