I think Quanticle should have asked questions, rather than making strong claims like “MIRI automatically assumes p” without looking into the issue more. On the other hand, I’m glad that someone raised issues like these in this comments section (given that disagreements and misunderstandings on these issues are pretty common), and I care more about the issues getting discussed and about people sharing their current epistemic state than about punishing people who rushed to a wrong conclusion or had tone issues or whatever. (If I were the Emperor of Karma I might allocate something like ‘net +2 karma’ to mildly reward this level of openness and directness, without over-rewarding lack-of-scholarship etc.)
Re ‘maybe this was all a ploy / rhetorical device’, I’m skeptical that that’s true in any strong/unusual sense. I also want to discourage treating it as normal, at the outset of a debate over some set of factual issues, to publicly speculate that the person on the other side has bad motives (in an accusatory/critical/dismissive/etc. way). There may be extreme cases where we’re forced to do that at the outset of a factual debate, but it should be pretty rare, given what it can do to discussion when those sorts of accusations are commonplace.
Re ‘maybe this was all a ploy / rhetorical device’, I’m skeptical that that’s true in any strong/unusual sense.
I don’t think that there’s anything particularly unusual about someone asking “Is there any evidence for claim X?” to imply that, no, there is not enough evidence for claim X. Rhetorical questions are such a common argumentative technique that you can sometimes employ them without even being consciously aware of it. That still doesn’t make it the kind of style of discourse I approve of, however, and downvoting is a compact way of expressing that disapproval.
I also want to discourage treating it as normal, at the outset of a debate over some set of factual issues, to publicly speculate that the person on the other side has bad motives (in an accusatory/critical/dismissive/etc. way).
To be clear, I didn’t reply to the original comment at all; my initial comment upthread was written purely in response to Zvi’s allegation that the downvoters of Quanticle’s comment were being unfair and/or petty. I disagreed with the notion that there was no valid reason to downvote, and I replied for that reason and that reason only. I certainly didn’t intend my comment to be interpreted as “public speculation” regarding Quanticle’s motives, only as an indication that the phrasing used could give the impression of bad motives, which I think is just as important as whether it was actually intended that way. More generally, however:
You said that the substance of a comment is more important than its tone, and I certainly don’t disagree, but that still doesn’t mean that issues relating to tone are unimportant. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the way a commenter phrases certain things can very strongly shape the subsequent flow of discussion, and that in some cases the effects are strong enough to outweigh the actual substance of their comment entirely, especially when there’s little to no substance to begin with (as in this case). Given that, I think voting based on such “ephemeral” considerations as tone and phrasing is just as valid as any other means of voting, and I take issue with the idea that you can’t downvote and/or criticize someone for anything other than the purely denotative meaning of their statements.
I think Quanticle should have asked questions, rather than making strong claims like “MIRI automatically assumes p” without looking into the issue more. On the other hand, I’m glad that someone raised issues like these in this comments section (given that disagreements and misunderstandings on these issues are pretty common), and I care more about the issues getting discussed and about people sharing their current epistemic state than about punishing people who rushed to a wrong conclusion or had tone issues or whatever. (If I were the Emperor of Karma I might allocate something like ‘net +2 karma’ to mildly reward this level of openness and directness, without over-rewarding lack-of-scholarship etc.)
Re ‘maybe this was all a ploy / rhetorical device’, I’m skeptical that that’s true in any strong/unusual sense. I also want to discourage treating it as normal, at the outset of a debate over some set of factual issues, to publicly speculate that the person on the other side has bad motives (in an accusatory/critical/dismissive/etc. way). There may be extreme cases where we’re forced to do that at the outset of a factual debate, but it should be pretty rare, given what it can do to discussion when those sorts of accusations are commonplace.
I don’t think that there’s anything particularly unusual about someone asking “Is there any evidence for claim X?” to imply that, no, there is not enough evidence for claim X. Rhetorical questions are such a common argumentative technique that you can sometimes employ them without even being consciously aware of it. That still doesn’t make it the kind of style of discourse I approve of, however, and downvoting is a compact way of expressing that disapproval.
To be clear, I didn’t reply to the original comment at all; my initial comment upthread was written purely in response to Zvi’s allegation that the downvoters of Quanticle’s comment were being unfair and/or petty. I disagreed with the notion that there was no valid reason to downvote, and I replied for that reason and that reason only. I certainly didn’t intend my comment to be interpreted as “public speculation” regarding Quanticle’s motives, only as an indication that the phrasing used could give the impression of bad motives, which I think is just as important as whether it was actually intended that way. More generally, however:
You said that the substance of a comment is more important than its tone, and I certainly don’t disagree, but that still doesn’t mean that issues relating to tone are unimportant. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the way a commenter phrases certain things can very strongly shape the subsequent flow of discussion, and that in some cases the effects are strong enough to outweigh the actual substance of their comment entirely, especially when there’s little to no substance to begin with (as in this case). Given that, I think voting based on such “ephemeral” considerations as tone and phrasing is just as valid as any other means of voting, and I take issue with the idea that you can’t downvote and/or criticize someone for anything other than the purely denotative meaning of their statements.