I think a reasonable reader could come away from that comment of gjm’s uncertain whether or not Said simply saying “examples?” would count as an example.
...
I should also note here that I don’t think you have explicitly staked out that you think Said just saying “examples?” is bad (like, you didn’t here, which was the obvious place to), I am inferring that from various things you’ve written (and, tho this source is more suspect and so has less influence, ways other people have reacted to Said before).
To clarify:
If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say “Examples?” would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say “Examples?” would not be enough to send a reasonable person toward the hypothesis that their conversational partner reliably doesn’t do their fair share of the labor.
“Do you have examples?” is one of the core, common, prosocial moves, and correctly so. It is a bid for the other person to put in extra work, but the scales of “are we both contributing?” don’t need to be balanced every three seconds, or even every conversation. Sometimes I’m the asker/learner and you’re the teacher/expounder, and other times the roles are reversed, and other times we go back and forth.
The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It’s having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.
Said simply saying “examples?” is an example, then, but only because of the strong prior from his accumulated behavior; if the rule is something like “doing this <100x/wk is fine, doing it >100x/wk is less fine,” then the question of whether a given instance “is an example” is slightly tricky.
I think this point is our core disagreement. I see the second comment saying “yeah, Duncan’s rule against horses, the thing where he dislikes white ones”, and you proceeding as if he just said “Duncan’s rule against horses.” I think there was a illusion of transparency behind “specifically reaffirmed by Said”.
Yeah, you may have pinned it down (the disagreement). I definitely don’t (currently) think it’s sensible to read the second comment that way, and certainly not sensible enough to mentally dock someone for not reading it that way even if that reading is technically available (which I agree it is).
Like, I think if you had said “STRAWMAN!” and tried to get us to put a scarlet S in Said’s username, this would have been a defensible accusation
I perhaps have some learned helplessness around what I can, in fact, expect from the mod team; I claim that if I had believed that this would be received as defensible I would’ve done that instead. At the time, I felt helpless and alone*/had no expectation of mod support for reasons I think are reasonable, and so was not proceeding as if there was any kind of request I could make, and so was not brainstorming requests.
*alone vis-a-vis moderators, not alone vis-a-vis other commenters like gjm
I do think that you should put a scarlet P in Said’s username, since he’s been doing it for a couple weeks now and is still doing it (c.f. “I have yet to see any compelling reason to conclude that this [extremely unlikely on its face hypothesis] is false.”).
In my favorite world, you call it a mislabeling and identify why you think the label fails to match (again, noting that gjm attempted to do so, tho I think not in a way that bridged the gap).
I again agree that this is clearly a better set of moves in some sense, but I’m thinking in a fabricated options frame and being, like, is that really actually a possible world, in that the whole problem is Said’s utterly exhausting and unrewarding mode of engagement. Like, I wonder if I might convince you that your favorite world is incoherent and impossible, because it’s one in which people are engaging in the colloquial definition of insanity and never updating their heuristics based on feedback. Or maybe you’re saying “do it for the audience and for site norms, then,” which feels less like throwing good money after bad.
But like. I think I’m getting dinged for impatience when I did not, previously, get headpats for patience? The wanted behavior feels unincentivized relative to the unwanted behavior.
When I say “locally”, I am starting the clock at Killing Socrates, which was perhaps unclear.
No, that was pretty clear, and that’s what generated the :((((((((. The choice to start the clock there feels unfair-to-Neville, like if I were a teacher I would glance at that and say “okay, obviously this is not the local beginning” and look further.
Do you think Said would not also stop if, for every post he read on LW, he found that someone else had already made the comment he would have liked to have made?
I am wary of irresponsibly theorizing about the contents of someone else’s mind. I do think that, if one looks over the explosive proliferation of his threads once he starts a back-and-forth, it’s unlikely that there’s some state in which Said is like “ah, people are already saying all the things!” I suspect that Said (like others, to be clear; this is not precisely a criticism) has an infinite priority list, and if all the things of top priority are handled by other commenters, he’ll move down to lower ones.
I do think that if you took all of Said’s comments, and distributed 8% of them each into the corpus of comments of Julia Galef, Anna Salamon, Rob Bensinger, Scott Garrabrant, you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Logan Brienne Strohl, Oliver Habryka, Kelsey Piper, Nate Soares, Eric Rogstad, Spencer Greenberg, and Dan Keys this would be much better. Part of the problem is the sheer concentration of princely entitlement and speaking-as-if-it-is-the-author’s-job-to-convince-Said-particularly-regardless-of-whether-Said’s-skepticism-is-a-signal-of-any-real-problem-with-the-claims.
If Kelsey Piper locally is like, buddy, you need to give me more examples, or if Spencer Greenberg locally is like, but what the heck do you even mean by “annoying,” there’s zero sense (on my part, at least) that here we go again, more taking-without-contributing. Instead, with Kelsey and Spencer it feels like a series of escalating favors and a tightening of the web of mutual obligation in which everybody is grateful to everybody else for having put in so many little bits of work here and there, of course I want to spill some words to help connect the dots for Kelsey and Spencer, they’ve spilled so many words helping me.
The pattern of “give, then take, then give, then take, then take, then take, then give, then give” is a healthy one to model, and is patriotically Athenian in the frame of my recent essay, and is not one which, if a thousand newbies were to start emulating, would cause a problem.
But perhaps our disagreement is that, on seeing Elizabeth’s comment, I didn’t have a strong impulse to ‘set the record straight’
I don’t think that mods should be chiming in and setting the record straight on every little thing. But when, like, Said spends multiple thousands of words in a literally irrational (in the sense of not having cruxes and not being open to update and being directly contradicted by evidence) screed strawmanning me and claiming that I block people for disagreeing with my claims or criticizing my arguments—
—and furthermore when I ask for mod help—
—then I do think that a LessWrong where a mod shows up to say “false” and “actually cut it out for real” is meaningfully different and meaningfully better than the current Wild West feel where Said doesn’t get in trouble but I do.
The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It’s having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.
But why should this be a problem?
Why should people say “hey, could you not, or even just a little less”? If you do something that isn’t bad, that isn’t not a problem, why should people ask you to stop? If it’s a good thing to do, why wouldn’t they instead ask you to do it more?
And why, indeed, are you still speaking in this transactional way?
If you write a post about some abstract concept, without any examples of it, and I write a post that says “What are some examples?”, I am not asking you to do labor on my behalf, I am not asking for a favor (which must be justified by some “favor credit”, some positive account of favors in the bank of Duncan). Quite frankly, I find that claim ridiculous to the point of offensiveness. What I am doing, in that scenario, is making a positive contribution to the discussion, both for your benefit and (even more importantly) for the benefit of other readers and commenters.
There is no good reason why you should resent responding to a request like “what are some examples”. There is no good reason why you should view it as an unjustified and entitled demand for a favor. There is definitely no good reason why you should view acceding to that request as being “for my benefit” (instead of, say, for your benefit, and for the benefit of readers).
(And the gall of saying “never reciprocating”, to me! When I write a post, I include examples pre-emptively, because I know that I should be asked to do so otherwise. Not “will be asked”, of course—but “should”. And when I write a post without enough examples, and someone asks for examples, I respond in great detail. Note that my responses in that thread are much, much longer than the comment which asked for examples. Of course they are! Because the question doesn’t need to be longer—but the answers do!)
(And you might say: “but Said, you barely write any posts—like one a year, at best!”. Indeed. Indeed.)
There is no good reason why you should resent responding to a request like “what are some examples”.
Maybe “resent” is doing most work here, but an excellent reason to not respond is that it takes work. To the extent that there are norms in place that urge response, they create motivation to suppress criticism that would urge response. An expectation that it’s normal for criticism to be a request for response that should normally be granted is pressure to do the work of responding, which is costly, which motivates defensive action in the form of suppressing criticism.
A culture could make it costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made. This is an inessential reason for suppressing criticism that can be removed, and therefore should, to make criticism cheaper and more abundant.
The content of criticism may of course motivate the author of a criticized text to make further statements, but the fact of criticism’s posting by itself should not. The fact of not responding to criticism is some sort of noisy evidence of not having a good response that is feasible or hedonic to make, but that’s Law, not something that can change for the sake of mechanism design.
It’s certainly doing a decent amount of work, I agree.
Anyhow, your overall point is taken—although I have to point out that that your last sentence seems like a rebuttal of your next-to-last sentence.
That having been said, of course the content of criticism matters. A piece of criticism could simply be bad, and clearly wrong; and then it’s good and proper to just ignore it (perhaps after having made sure that an interested party could, if they so wished, easily see or learn why that criticism is bad). I do not, and would not, advocate for a norm that all comments, all critical questions, etc., regardless of their content, must always be responded to. That is unreasonable.
I also want to note—as I’ve said several times in this discussion, but it bears repeating—there is nothing problematic or blameworthy about someone other than the author of a post responding to questions, criticism, requests for examples, etc. That is fine. Collaborative development of ideas is a perfectly normal and good thing.
What that adds up to, I think, is a set of requirements for a set of social norms which is quite compatible with your suggestion of making it “costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made”.
The content of criticism may of course motivate the author of a criticized text to make further statements, but the fact of criticism’s posting by itself should not. The fact of not responding to criticism is some sort of noisy evidence of not having a good response that is feasible or hedonic to make, but that’s Law, not something that can change for the sake of mechanism design.
I have to point out that that your last sentence seems like a rebuttal of your next-to-last sentence
They are in opposition, but the point is that they are about different kinds of things, and one of them can’t respond to policy decisions. It’s useful to have a norm that lessens the burden of addressing criticism. It’s Law of reasoning that this burden can nonetheless materialize. The Law is implacable but importantly asymmetric, it only holds when it does, not when the court of public opinion says it should. While the norms are the other way around, and their pressure is somewhat insensitive to facts of a particular situation, so it’s worth pointing them in a generally useful direction, with no hope for their nuanced or at all sane response to details.
Perhaps the presence of Law justifies norms that are over-the-top forgiving to ignoring criticism, or find ignoring criticism a bit praiseworthy when it would be at all unpleasant not to ignore it, to oppose the average valence of Law, while of course attempting to preserve its asymmetry. So I’d say my last sentence in that comment argues that the next-to-last sentence should be stronger. Which I’m not sure I agree with, but here’s the argument.
Said, above, is saying a bunch of things, many of which I agree with, as if they are contra my position or my previous claims.
He can’t pass my ITT (not that I’ve asked him to), which means that he doesn’t understand the thing he’s trying to disagree with, which means that his disagreement is not actually pointing at my position; the things he finds ridiculous and offensive are cardboard cutouts of his own construction. More detail on that over here.
BTW I was surprised earlier to see you agree with the ‘relational’ piece of this comment because Duncan’s grandparent comment seems like it’s a pretty central example of that. (I view you as having more of a “visitor-commons” orientation towards LW, and Duncan has more of an orientation where this is a place where people inhabit their pairwise relationships, as well as more one-to-many relationships.)
Sorry, I’m not quite sure I follow the references here. You’re saying that… this comment… is a central example of… what, exactly?
(I view you as having more of a “visitor-commons” orientation towards LW, and Duncan has more of an orientation where this is a place where people inhabit their pairwise relationships, as well as more one-to-many relationships.)
That… seems like it’s probably accurate… I think? I think I’d have to more clearly understand what you’re getting at in your comment, in order to judge whether this part makes sense to me.
Sorry, my previous comment wasn’t very clear. Earlier I said:
Duncan is trying to suggest what is permissible or impermissible is more relational and deals with people’s attitudes towards each other (as suggested by gjm here).
and you responded with:
I also—and, perhaps, more importantly—think that the interactions in question are not only fine, but good, in a “relational” sense.
(and a few related comments) which made me think “hmm, I don’t think we mean the same thing by ‘relational’. Then Duncan’s comment had a frame that I would have described as ‘relational’—as in focusing on the relationships between the people saying and hearing the words—which you then described as transactional.
I think that the sense in which I would characterize Duncan’s description as “transactional” is… mostly orthogonal to the question of “is this a relational frame”. I don’t think that this has much to do with the “‘visitor commons’ vs. ‘pairwise relationships’” distinction, either (although that distinction is an interesting and possibly important one in its own right, and you’re certainly more right than wrong about where my preferences lie in that regard).
(There’s more that I could say about this, but I don’t know whether anything of importance hinges on this point. It seems like it mostly shouldn’t, but perhaps you are a better judge of that…)
“—then I do think that a LessWrong where a mod shows up to say “false” and “actually cut it out for real” is meaningfully different and meaningfully better than the current Wild West feel where Said doesn’t get in trouble but I do.”
I think Vaniver right now is focusing on resolving the point “is Said a liar?”, but not resolving the “who did most wrong?” question. (I’m not actually 100% sure on Vaniver’s goals/takes at the moment). I agree this is an important subquestion but it’s not the primary question I’m interested in.
I’m somewhat worried about this thread taking in more energy that it quite warrants, and making Duncan feel more persecuted than really makes sense here.
I roughly agree with Vaniver than “Liar!” isn’t the right accusation to have levied, but also don’t judge you harshly for having made it.
I think this comment of mine summarizes my relevant opinions here.
(tagging @Vaniver to make sure he’s at least tracking this comment)
I note (while acknowledging that this is a small and subtle distinction, but claiming that it is an important one nonetheless) that I said that I now categorize Said as a liar, which is an importantly and intentionally weaker claim than Said is a liar, i.e. “everyone should be able to see that he’s a liar” or “if you don’t think he’s a liar you are definitely wrong.”
(This is me in the past behaving in line with the points I just made under Said’s comment, about not confusing [how things seem to me] with [how they are] or [how they do or should seem to others].)
This is much much closer to saying “Liar!” than it is to not saying “Liar!” … if one is to round me off, that’s the correct place to round me off to. But it is still a rounding.
To clarify:
If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say “Examples?” would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say “Examples?” would not be enough to send a reasonable person toward the hypothesis that their conversational partner reliably doesn’t do their fair share of the labor.
“Do you have examples?” is one of the core, common, prosocial moves, and correctly so. It is a bid for the other person to put in extra work, but the scales of “are we both contributing?” don’t need to be balanced every three seconds, or even every conversation. Sometimes I’m the asker/learner and you’re the teacher/expounder, and other times the roles are reversed, and other times we go back and forth.
The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It’s having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.
Said simply saying “examples?” is an example, then, but only because of the strong prior from his accumulated behavior; if the rule is something like “doing this <100x/wk is fine, doing it >100x/wk is less fine,” then the question of whether a given instance “is an example” is slightly tricky.
Yeah, you may have pinned it down (the disagreement). I definitely don’t (currently) think it’s sensible to read the second comment that way, and certainly not sensible enough to mentally dock someone for not reading it that way even if that reading is technically available (which I agree it is).
I perhaps have some learned helplessness around what I can, in fact, expect from the mod team; I claim that if I had believed that this would be received as defensible I would’ve done that instead. At the time, I felt helpless and alone*/had no expectation of mod support for reasons I think are reasonable, and so was not proceeding as if there was any kind of request I could make, and so was not brainstorming requests.
*alone vis-a-vis moderators, not alone vis-a-vis other commenters like gjm
I do think that you should put a scarlet P in Said’s username, since he’s been doing it for a couple weeks now and is still doing it (c.f. “I have yet to see any compelling reason to conclude that this [extremely unlikely on its face hypothesis] is false.”).
I again agree that this is clearly a better set of moves in some sense, but I’m thinking in a fabricated options frame and being, like, is that really actually a possible world, in that the whole problem is Said’s utterly exhausting and unrewarding mode of engagement. Like, I wonder if I might convince you that your favorite world is incoherent and impossible, because it’s one in which people are engaging in the colloquial definition of insanity and never updating their heuristics based on feedback. Or maybe you’re saying “do it for the audience and for site norms, then,” which feels less like throwing good money after bad.
But like. I think I’m getting dinged for impatience when I did not, previously, get headpats for patience? The wanted behavior feels unincentivized relative to the unwanted behavior.
No, that was pretty clear, and that’s what generated the :((((((((. The choice to start the clock there feels unfair-to-Neville, like if I were a teacher I would glance at that and say “okay, obviously this is not the local beginning” and look further.
I am wary of irresponsibly theorizing about the contents of someone else’s mind. I do think that, if one looks over the explosive proliferation of his threads once he starts a back-and-forth, it’s unlikely that there’s some state in which Said is like “ah, people are already saying all the things!” I suspect that Said (like others, to be clear; this is not precisely a criticism) has an infinite priority list, and if all the things of top priority are handled by other commenters, he’ll move down to lower ones.
I do think that if you took all of Said’s comments, and distributed 8% of them each into the corpus of comments of Julia Galef, Anna Salamon, Rob Bensinger, Scott Garrabrant, you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Logan Brienne Strohl, Oliver Habryka, Kelsey Piper, Nate Soares, Eric Rogstad, Spencer Greenberg, and Dan Keys this would be much better. Part of the problem is the sheer concentration of princely entitlement and speaking-as-if-it-is-the-author’s-job-to-convince-Said-particularly-regardless-of-whether-Said’s-skepticism-is-a-signal-of-any-real-problem-with-the-claims.
If Kelsey Piper locally is like, buddy, you need to give me more examples, or if Spencer Greenberg locally is like, but what the heck do you even mean by “annoying,” there’s zero sense (on my part, at least) that here we go again, more taking-without-contributing. Instead, with Kelsey and Spencer it feels like a series of escalating favors and a tightening of the web of mutual obligation in which everybody is grateful to everybody else for having put in so many little bits of work here and there, of course I want to spill some words to help connect the dots for Kelsey and Spencer, they’ve spilled so many words helping me.
The pattern of “give, then take, then give, then take, then take, then take, then give, then give” is a healthy one to model, and is patriotically Athenian in the frame of my recent essay, and is not one which, if a thousand newbies were to start emulating, would cause a problem.
I don’t think that mods should be chiming in and setting the record straight on every little thing. But when, like, Said spends multiple thousands of words in a literally irrational (in the sense of not having cruxes and not being open to update and being directly contradicted by evidence) screed strawmanning me and claiming that I block people for disagreeing with my claims or criticizing my arguments—
—and furthermore when I ask for mod help—
—then I do think that a LessWrong where a mod shows up to say “false” and “actually cut it out for real” is meaningfully different and meaningfully better than the current Wild West feel where Said doesn’t get in trouble but I do.
But why should this be a problem?
Why should people say “hey, could you not, or even just a little less”? If you do something that isn’t bad, that isn’t not a problem, why should people ask you to stop? If it’s a good thing to do, why wouldn’t they instead ask you to do it more?
And why, indeed, are you still speaking in this transactional way?
If you write a post about some abstract concept, without any examples of it, and I write a post that says “What are some examples?”, I am not asking you to do labor on my behalf, I am not asking for a favor (which must be justified by some “favor credit”, some positive account of favors in the bank of Duncan). Quite frankly, I find that claim ridiculous to the point of offensiveness. What I am doing, in that scenario, is making a positive contribution to the discussion, both for your benefit and (even more importantly) for the benefit of other readers and commenters.
There is no good reason why you should resent responding to a request like “what are some examples”. There is no good reason why you should view it as an unjustified and entitled demand for a favor. There is definitely no good reason why you should view acceding to that request as being “for my benefit” (instead of, say, for your benefit, and for the benefit of readers).
(And the gall of saying “never reciprocating”, to me! When I write a post, I include examples pre-emptively, because I know that I should be asked to do so otherwise. Not “will be asked”, of course—but “should”. And when I write a post without enough examples, and someone asks for examples, I respond in great detail. Note that my responses in that thread are much, much longer than the comment which asked for examples. Of course they are! Because the question doesn’t need to be longer—but the answers do!)
(And you might say: “but Said, you barely write any posts—like one a year, at best!”. Indeed. Indeed.)
Maybe “resent” is doing most work here, but an excellent reason to not respond is that it takes work. To the extent that there are norms in place that urge response, they create motivation to suppress criticism that would urge response. An expectation that it’s normal for criticism to be a request for response that should normally be granted is pressure to do the work of responding, which is costly, which motivates defensive action in the form of suppressing criticism.
A culture could make it costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made. This is an inessential reason for suppressing criticism that can be removed, and therefore should, to make criticism cheaper and more abundant.
The content of criticism may of course motivate the author of a criticized text to make further statements, but the fact of criticism’s posting by itself should not. The fact of not responding to criticism is some sort of noisy evidence of not having a good response that is feasible or hedonic to make, but that’s Law, not something that can change for the sake of mechanism design.
It’s certainly doing a decent amount of work, I agree.
Anyhow, your overall point is taken—although I have to point out that that your last sentence seems like a rebuttal of your next-to-last sentence.
That having been said, of course the content of criticism matters. A piece of criticism could simply be bad, and clearly wrong; and then it’s good and proper to just ignore it (perhaps after having made sure that an interested party could, if they so wished, easily see or learn why that criticism is bad). I do not, and would not, advocate for a norm that all comments, all critical questions, etc., regardless of their content, must always be responded to. That is unreasonable.
I also want to note—as I’ve said several times in this discussion, but it bears repeating—there is nothing problematic or blameworthy about someone other than the author of a post responding to questions, criticism, requests for examples, etc. That is fine. Collaborative development of ideas is a perfectly normal and good thing.
What that adds up to, I think, is a set of requirements for a set of social norms which is quite compatible with your suggestion of making it “costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made”.
They are in opposition, but the point is that they are about different kinds of things, and one of them can’t respond to policy decisions. It’s useful to have a norm that lessens the burden of addressing criticism. It’s Law of reasoning that this burden can nonetheless materialize. The Law is implacable but importantly asymmetric, it only holds when it does, not when the court of public opinion says it should. While the norms are the other way around, and their pressure is somewhat insensitive to facts of a particular situation, so it’s worth pointing them in a generally useful direction, with no hope for their nuanced or at all sane response to details.
Perhaps the presence of Law justifies norms that are over-the-top forgiving to ignoring criticism, or find ignoring criticism a bit praiseworthy when it would be at all unpleasant not to ignore it, to oppose the average valence of Law, while of course attempting to preserve its asymmetry. So I’d say my last sentence in that comment argues that the next-to-last sentence should be stronger. Which I’m not sure I agree with, but here’s the argument.
Said, above, is saying a bunch of things, many of which I agree with, as if they are contra my position or my previous claims.
He can’t pass my ITT (not that I’ve asked him to), which means that he doesn’t understand the thing he’s trying to disagree with, which means that his disagreement is not actually pointing at my position; the things he finds ridiculous and offensive are cardboard cutouts of his own construction. More detail on that over here.
This response is manifestly untenable, given the comment of yours that I was responding to.
BTW I was surprised earlier to see you agree with the ‘relational’ piece of this comment because Duncan’s grandparent comment seems like it’s a pretty central example of that. (I view you as having more of a “visitor-commons” orientation towards LW, and Duncan has more of an orientation where this is a place where people inhabit their pairwise relationships, as well as more one-to-many relationships.)
Sorry, I’m not quite sure I follow the references here. You’re saying that… this comment… is a central example of… what, exactly?
That… seems like it’s probably accurate… I think? I think I’d have to more clearly understand what you’re getting at in your comment, in order to judge whether this part makes sense to me.
Sorry, my previous comment wasn’t very clear. Earlier I said:
and you responded with:
(and a few related comments) which made me think “hmm, I don’t think we mean the same thing by ‘relational’. Then Duncan’s comment had a frame that I would have described as ‘relational’—as in focusing on the relationships between the people saying and hearing the words—which you then described as transactional.
Ah, I see.
I think that the sense in which I would characterize Duncan’s description as “transactional” is… mostly orthogonal to the question of “is this a relational frame”. I don’t think that this has much to do with the “‘visitor commons’ vs. ‘pairwise relationships’” distinction, either (although that distinction is an interesting and possibly important one in its own right, and you’re certainly more right than wrong about where my preferences lie in that regard).
(There’s more that I could say about this, but I don’t know whether anything of importance hinges on this point. It seems like it mostly shouldn’t, but perhaps you are a better judge of that…)
A couple quick notes for now:
I agree with Duncan here it’s kinda silly to start the clock at “Killing Socrates”. Insofar as there’s a current live fight that is worth tracking separately from overall history, I think it probably starts in the comments of LW Team is adjusting moderation policy, and I think the recent-ish back and forth on Basics of Rationalist Discourse and “Rationalist Discourse” Is Like “Physicist Motors” is recent enough to be relevant (hence me including the in the OP)
I think Vaniver right now is focusing on resolving the point “is Said a liar?”, but not resolving the “who did most wrong?” question. (I’m not actually 100% sure on Vaniver’s goals/takes at the moment). I agree this is an important subquestion but it’s not the primary question I’m interested in.
I’m somewhat worried about this thread taking in more energy that it quite warrants, and making Duncan feel more persecuted than really makes sense here.
I roughly agree with Vaniver than “Liar!” isn’t the right accusation to have levied, but also don’t judge you harshly for having made it.
I think this comment of mine summarizes my relevant opinions here.
(tagging @Vaniver to make sure he’s at least tracking this comment)
Thanks.
I note (while acknowledging that this is a small and subtle distinction, but claiming that it is an important one nonetheless) that I said that I now categorize Said as a liar, which is an importantly and intentionally weaker claim than Said is a liar, i.e. “everyone should be able to see that he’s a liar” or “if you don’t think he’s a liar you are definitely wrong.”
(This is me in the past behaving in line with the points I just made under Said’s comment, about not confusing [how things seem to me] with [how they are] or [how they do or should seem to others].)
This is much much closer to saying “Liar!” than it is to not saying “Liar!” … if one is to round me off, that’s the correct place to round me off to. But it is still a rounding.
Nod, seems fair to note.