why in the world would we believe you when you say such things?
But I wouldn’t say such things.
“Such things” above refers to your claim that you’ve never engaged in bad faith, which is a thing you just said.
I am no longer concerned with your beliefs about anything, after your blatant falsehoods in this comment, in which you explicitly claim that four different links each say something that none of them come even remotely close to saying. That is sufficient justification for me to categorize you as an intentional liar, and I will treat you as such from this point forward.
“Such things” above refers to your claim that you’ve never engaged in bad faith, which is a thing you just said.
But this makes no sense. As I made it clear, when speaking of “bad faith”, I was referring to your (apparent) admission of engaging in bad faith. There is no need to “believe” or “disbelieve” your subsequent claims about whether you’ve done this, after you’ve admitted doing so.
Certainly I wouldn’t say “you must believe me that I’m not engaging in bad faith [but this is entirely a matter of my internal state, and not public record]”. That is the sort of thing of which you might reasonably say “why would we believe you?”. So, indeed, I did not “just” (or ever, in my recollection) say any such thing.
your blatant falsehoods in this comment, in which you explicitly claim that four different links each say something that none of them come even remotely close to saying
On the contrary, I correctly (as far as I can tell) claim that the five provided links demonstrate that, as I said, you believe a certain thing. I did not claim that you said that thing, only that you clearly (so it seemed, and seems, to me) believe it. (Certainly your behavior is difficult to explain otherwise; and when a person says something—multiple times and in multiple ways—that sounds like X, and then they also act like they believe X, is it not reasonable to conclude that they believe X? Of course more complex explanations are possible, as they always are; but the simplest explanation remains.)
Now, you later—after I’d responded, and after the ensuing discussion thread—edited the linked comment (Wayback Machine link as evidence; screenshot)[1] to add an explicit disclaimer that you do not, in fact, hold the belief in question.
Had you included such a note at the outset, the conversation would have gone differently. (Perhaps more productively, perhaps not—but differently, in any case. For example, I would have asked you for examples of you asking for examples and of you providing examples when asked; and then—supposing that you gave them—we could have discussed those examples, and analyzed what made them different from those which I provided, and perhaps gained understanding thereby.)
But that note wasn’t there before. So, as I see it, I made a claim, which had, until that moment and to my knowledge, been contradicted by nothing—not even by any disclaimer from you. This claim seemed to me to be both true and fairly obvious. In response to a challenge (by gjm) that the claim seemed like a strawman, I provided evidence, which seemed (and continues to seem) to me to be convincing.
I do not see any way to construe this that makes it reasonable to all me an “intentional liar”. The charge, as far as I can tell, is wholly unsubstantiated.
Now, you may protest that the claim is actually false. Perhaps. Certainly I don’t make any pretensions to omniscience. But neither do I withdraw the claim entirely. While I would no longer say that I “do not think it’s controversial at all to ascribe this opinion” to you (obviously it is controversial!), your previous statements (including some in this very discussion thread) and your behavior continue (so it seems to me) to support my claim about your apparent views.
I now say “apparent”, of course, because you did say that you don’t, in fact, hold the belief which I ascribed to you. But that still leaves the question of why you write and act as though you did hold that belief. Is it that your actual views on the matter are similar to (perhaps even indistinguishable for practical purposes from) the previously-claimed belief, but differ in some nuance (whether that be important nuance or not)? Is it that there are some circumstantial factors at play, which you perceive but I do not? Something else?
I think that it would be useful—not just to you or to me, but to everyone on Less Wrong—to dig into this further.
Incidentally, I find this to be a quite unfortunate habit of yours. It has happened several times in this conversation that you posted some comment, I’ve responded to it, and then you later edited the comment in such a way that my response would’ve been very different if I’d read the edited version first (or, in some cases, would never have been written at all). In no cases almost no cases (EDIT: correction) have you signaled the edit (as I do when I edit for substance), leaving me no way to discover, except by vigilant watchfulness, that a comment I’d responded to now contained new and/or different words, sentences, paragraphs. I cannot but strongly disapprove of such behavior.
Actually, update: I just remembered I could ban them both from this post temporarily. I just did that, and undid the previous rate limit. I do ask them not to engage in various proxy threads about this in other posts.
further update: moderators talked for awhile today, writing up some thoughts. Most likely tomorrow we’ll post a top-level post briefly outlining the situation background, and post individual comments with our respective takes.
“Such things” above refers to your claim that you’ve never engaged in bad faith, which is a thing you just said.
I am no longer concerned with your beliefs about anything, after your blatant falsehoods in this comment, in which you explicitly claim that four different links each say something that none of them come even remotely close to saying. That is sufficient justification for me to categorize you as an intentional liar, and I will treat you as such from this point forward.
But this makes no sense. As I made it clear, when speaking of “bad faith”, I was referring to your (apparent) admission of engaging in bad faith. There is no need to “believe” or “disbelieve” your subsequent claims about whether you’ve done this, after you’ve admitted doing so.
Certainly I wouldn’t say “you must believe me that I’m not engaging in bad faith [but this is entirely a matter of my internal state, and not public record]”. That is the sort of thing of which you might reasonably say “why would we believe you?”. So, indeed, I did not “just” (or ever, in my recollection) say any such thing.
On the contrary, I correctly (as far as I can tell) claim that the five provided links demonstrate that, as I said, you believe a certain thing. I did not claim that you said that thing, only that you clearly (so it seemed, and seems, to me) believe it. (Certainly your behavior is difficult to explain otherwise; and when a person says something—multiple times and in multiple ways—that sounds like X, and then they also act like they believe X, is it not reasonable to conclude that they believe X? Of course more complex explanations are possible, as they always are; but the simplest explanation remains.)
Now, you later—after I’d responded, and after the ensuing discussion thread—edited the linked comment (Wayback Machine link as evidence; screenshot)[1] to add an explicit disclaimer that you do not, in fact, hold the belief in question.
Had you included such a note at the outset, the conversation would have gone differently. (Perhaps more productively, perhaps not—but differently, in any case. For example, I would have asked you for examples of you asking for examples and of you providing examples when asked; and then—supposing that you gave them—we could have discussed those examples, and analyzed what made them different from those which I provided, and perhaps gained understanding thereby.)
But that note wasn’t there before. So, as I see it, I made a claim, which had, until that moment and to my knowledge, been contradicted by nothing—not even by any disclaimer from you. This claim seemed to me to be both true and fairly obvious. In response to a challenge (by gjm) that the claim seemed like a strawman, I provided evidence, which seemed (and continues to seem) to me to be convincing.
I do not see any way to construe this that makes it reasonable to all me an “intentional liar”. The charge, as far as I can tell, is wholly unsubstantiated.
Now, you may protest that the claim is actually false. Perhaps. Certainly I don’t make any pretensions to omniscience. But neither do I withdraw the claim entirely. While I would no longer say that I “do not think it’s controversial at all to ascribe this opinion” to you (obviously it is controversial!), your previous statements (including some in this very discussion thread) and your behavior continue (so it seems to me) to support my claim about your apparent views.
I now say “apparent”, of course, because you did say that you don’t, in fact, hold the belief which I ascribed to you. But that still leaves the question of why you write and act as though you did hold that belief. Is it that your actual views on the matter are similar to (perhaps even indistinguishable for practical purposes from) the previously-claimed belief, but differ in some nuance (whether that be important nuance or not)? Is it that there are some circumstantial factors at play, which you perceive but I do not? Something else?
I think that it would be useful—not just to you or to me, but to everyone on Less Wrong—to dig into this further.
Incidentally, I find this to be a quite unfortunate habit of yours. It has happened several times in this conversation that you posted some comment, I’ve responded to it, and then you later edited the comment in such a way that my response would’ve been very different if I’d read the edited version first (or, in some cases, would never have been written at all). In
no casesalmost no cases (EDIT: correction) have you signaled the edit (as I do when I edit for substance), leaving me no way to discover, except by vigilant watchfulness, that a comment I’d responded to now contained new and/or different words, sentences, paragraphs. I cannot but strongly disapprove of such behavior.Mod note: I just gave Duncan and Said a commenting rate-limit of 1-per-day, mostly as a “slow down and give mods time to actually think” measure.
(This is not my ideal technological solution to the situation, but it was the easiest one to implement quickly, apologies)
Actually, update: I just remembered I could ban them both from this post temporarily. I just did that, and undid the previous rate limit. I do ask them not to engage in various proxy threads about this in other posts.
further update: moderators talked for awhile today, writing up some thoughts. Most likely tomorrow we’ll post a top-level post briefly outlining the situation background, and post individual comments with our respective takes.
Needless to say, I don’t agree with your characterization (as my comment in that thread notes).