I thought your original comments were not helpful for readers to gain useful information. I am encouraging you to elaborate and hope you will give a clear explanation of your position when you post.
I was insufficiently clear: that was a question about your model of my motivation, not what you want my motivation to be. You can say you want to hear more, but if you act against people saying things, which do you expect to have more impact?
But in the spirit of kindness I will write a longer response.
This subject is difficult to talk about because your support here is tepid and reluctant at best, and your detractors are polite.
Now, you might look at OrphanWilde or Clarity and say “you call that polite?”—no, I don’t. Those are the only people willing to break politeness and voice their lack of approval in detail. This anecdote about people talking in the quiet car comes to mind; lots of people look at something and realize “this is a problem” but only a few decide it’s worth the cost to speak up about it. Disproportionately, those are going to be people who feel the cost less strongly.
There’s a related common knowledge point—I might think this is likely net negative, but I don’t know how many other people think this is a likely net negative. Only if I know that lots of people think this is a likely net negative, and that they are also aware that this is the sentiment, does it make sense to be the spokesperson for that view. If I know about that dynamic, I can deliberately try to jumpstart the process by paying the costs of establishing common knowledge.
And so by writing a short comment I was hoping to get the best of both worlds—signalling that I think this is likely a net negative and that this is an opinion that should be public, without having to go into the awkward details of why.
That’s just the social dynamics. Let’s get to the actual content. Why do I think this is likely a net negative? Normally I would write something like this privately, but I’ll make it public because we’re already having a public discussion.
I agree that it would be nice if the broader population knew more clear thinking techniques. It’s not obvious to me that it would be nice if more of the broader population came to LW. I think that deliberative rationality, like discussed on LW, is mostly useful for people with lots of spare CPU cycles and a reflective personality.
Once, I shared some bread I baked with my then-landlord. She liked it, and asked me how I made it, and I said “oh, it’s really easy, let me lend you the book I learned from.” She demurred; she didn’t like reading things, and learned much better watching people do things. Sure, I said, and invited her over the next time I baked some to show her how it’s done.
The Sequences is very much “The Way for software engineer-types as radioed back by Eliezer Yudkowsky.” I am pessimistic about attempts to get other types of people closer to The Way by translating The Sequences into a language closer to theirs; much more than just the language needs to change, because the inferential gaps are in different places. I strongly suspect your ‘typical American’ with IQ 100 would get more out of The Way as radioed back by someone closer to them. Byron Katie, with her workshops and her Youtube videos, is the sort of person I would model after if I was targeting a broad market.
I have not paid close attention to the material you’ve produced because I find it painful. From what little I have seen, I have mostly gotten the impression that it’s poorly presented, and am some combination of unwilling and unable to provide you detailed criticism on why. I also think this is more than that I’m not the target audience—I don’t have the negative reaction to pjeby that many do, for example, and he has much more of a self-help-style popular approach. To recklessly speculate on the underlying causes, I don’t get the impression that you deeply respect or understand your audience, and what you think they want doesn’t line up with what they actually want, in a way that seems transparent. It seems like How do you do, fellow kids?.
Standard writing advice is “write what you know.” If you want to do rationality for college professors, great! I imagine that your comparative advantage at that would be higher. But just because you don’t see people pointing rationality at the masses doesn’t mean that’s a hole you would be any good at filling. Among other things, I would worry that because you’re not the target audience, you won’t be aware of what’s already there / what your competition is.
Only if I know that lots of people think this is a likely net negative, and that they are also aware that this is the sentiment, does it make sense to be the spokesperson for that view. If I know about that dynamic, I can deliberately try to jumpstart the process by paying the costs of establishing common knowledge.
The same effect works if people think this is a net positive. Furthermore, Less Wrong is a quite critical community, with people much more likely to provide criticism than support, as the latter wins less social status points. This is not to cast aspersions on the community at all—there’s a reason I participate actively. I like being challenged and updating my beliefs. But let’s be honest, this is a community of challenge and debate, not warm fuzzies and kumbayah.
Now let’s get to the meat of the matter.
I agree that it would be nice if the broader population knew more clear thinking techniques. It’s not obvious to me that it would be nice if more of the broader population came to LW.
I agree that it would not be nice if more of the broader population came to LW, the inferential gap would be way too big, and Endless September sucks. I discuss more in my comment here how that is not the goal I am pursuing, together with other InIn participants. The goal is to simply convey more clear thinking techniques effectively to the broad audience and raise the sanity waterline. For a select few, as that comment describes, they can go up to LW, likely those with a significantly high IQ but lack of sufficient education about how their mind works.
To recklessly speculate on the underlying causes, I don’t get the impression that you deeply respect or understand your audience
I am confused by this comment. If I didn’t understand my audience, how come my articles are so successful with them? Believe me, I have extensively researched the audiences there, and how to engage them well. You fail at my mind if you think my writing would be only engaging to college professors. And please consider who you are talking to when you discuss writing advice. I have read many books about writing, and taught writing as part of my college teaching.
As proof, here is evidence. I have only started publishing on Lifehacker—published 3 so far—and my articles way outperform the average of being shared under 1K. This is the average for experienced and non-experienced writers alike. My articles have all been shared over 1K times, and some twice as much if not more. The fact that they are shared so widely is demonstrable evidence that I understand my audience and engage it well.
Has this caused you to update on any of your claims to any extent?
You’re welcome! Thank you for continuing to be polite.
Has this caused you to update on any of your claims to any extent?
I was already aware of how many times your articles have been shared. I would not base my judgment of a painter’s skill with the brush on how many books on painting they had read.
I guess the metaphor I would take for the painter is how many of her paintings have sold. That’s the appropriate metaphor for how many times the articles were shared. If the painter’s goal is to sell paintings with specific content—as it is my goal to have articles shared with specific content not typically read by an ordinary person—then sharing of articles widely indicates success.
I see that you can read my mind and my votes. Glad you have that ability. Can you please provide evidence of what I am thinking and how I am voting? Thanks!
You can’t and you won’t. Your statements are patently false. I have in fact not consistently downvoted everyone who criticized me. I try to follow the general guidelines on voting. Please avoid making false statements in the future.
Anyway, not really interested in engaging in a conversation where you have vague accusations again, which are part of your general agenda against Intentional Insights, including making abusive/trollish claims, as you have previously explicitly acknowledged your intentions to be.
EDIT: Edited to include the link to the general guidelines on voting.
I see that you can read my mind and my votes. Glad you have that ability
It’s part of the Dark Arts package. I’ll dryly observe that I knew you downvoted him—how do you think I knew that you downvoted him? It’s not like downvotes come with names attached. Yes, I can “read your mind”, which is to say, I read the -massive- amounts of connotation information associated with otherwise bland text.
Can you please provide evidence of what I am thinking and how I am voting?
You, uh, admitted to it? “I thought his comments were not worth attention”
If it helps to know, extra downvotes your getting specifically in this thread, but not other ones, are coming from me. This comment isn’t meant as a glib statement to signal my affective disapproval. I just think this conversation is going nowhere, and think the quality of dialogue is getting worse. I’m downvoting these comments as I would others. I’m commenting so you know why I’m downvoting, and don’t cast aspersions at other users.
I can generally tell where downvotes are coming from. The aspersion I threw at Gleb is that he is, as far as I can tell, using sockpuppet accounts to upvote his own stuff (when he thinks it’s important). Complaining about my own downvotes would be petty and counterproductive. (Particularly since my total karma score remains unchanged from the beginning of this debacle. It was up 100 at one point, but dropped back down.)
I understand you use posturing and accusations without evidence as part of your Dark Arts arsenal, and accept that. I doubt anyone will come across this comment, since it’s so far down and the thread is not new. Just wanted you to know personally, in case you aren’t simply posturing, that I don’t use sockpuppets. I have a number of Less Wronger friends who support the cause of spreading rational thinking broadly, and whenever I make significant posts or particularly salient comments, I let them know, so that they can give me optimizing suggestions and feedback.
Since they happen to share many of my views, they sometimes upvote my comments. They generally don’t participate actively, and this is a rare exception on the part of Raelifin, as they do not want to be caught in the backlash. So FYI for the future. Feel free to continue making these accusations for Dark Arts purposes if you wish, but I just wanted you to know.
The term for extreme versions of this is “meatpuppet”. Of course having friends is not the same thing as having meatpuppets, and I have no way of knowing to what extent your friends are LW participants who just happen to be your friends and would have upvoted your articles anyway, and to what extent they’re people who come here only to upvote your articles for you. The nearer the latter, the more meatpuppety.
Well, didn’t expect other people besides myself and OrphanWilde to still be reading this thread, updating on that.
The people who I’m talking about are LW participants, I wouldn’t ask them to give me feedback and advice on my writing and engagement otherwise, what’s the point of doing so? To be clear, far from all of them upvote my comments, as they don’t agree with everything I write, of course. And my point in bringing their attention to it is for me to improve my communication, and also help myself update. It’s harder to update when things are said in a hostile way by faceless LW commenters, but my friends can provide me with a trusted external perspective on things. They do tend to agree with most stuff, sometimes choose to upvote, and rarely comment, for the reasons stated above.
I’m sharing all of this for the sake of transparency, as this is a strong value I hold. Not something I had to share, and I know it arouses suspicions, but this is my choice due to my personal value system.
You have consistently downvoted everyone who criticized you
I have specific evidence that I actually upvoted some people who made statements not friendly to me when I thought they made good points worthy of public consideration. Please avoid lying in the future. It really harms your reputation.
I don’t have a reputation to protect, or at least not a terribly positive one (indeed, I dislike having a positive reputation, because it makes it costly to abandon it). I do believe I previously advised you on the benefits and drawbacks of that.
And now I see someone went through and downvoted all of my previous posts and comments. I suppose it wasn’t you, because your mastery of Dark Arts would enable you to find more creative ways of harming InIn and me.
Or who knows, maybe it was you. Hard to tell at this point. Not very familiar at all with these sorts of underhanded strategies and mind games and deliberate efforts to attack my reputation on Less Wrong, as you clearly describe here is your intention.
Or who knows, maybe it was you. Hard to tell at this point. Not very familiar at all with these sorts of underhanded strategies and mind games and deliberate efforts to attack my reputation on Less Wrong, as you clearly describe here is your intention.
This paragraph feels passive-aggressive to me. If you think you got mass downvoted tell Nancy and she can ask Trike Apps for the perpetrator.
You realize that when you edit your comments, an asterisk shows up? Because I tire of your rather boring and predictable approach to Dark Arts, I’ll go ahead and head this one off: I didn’t downvote all of your previous posts and comments, I downvoted those here, in this post, where you were spamming. Additionally, a lazy look through your profile turns up several posts and comments which, quite definitively, were not downvoted. If your upvotes have taken a shock, it’s because of your behavior, not a downvote bot.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mvw/improving_the_effectiveness_of_effective_altruism/ for one example of a non-downvoted post from the first page of your posts. Given your rather blatant use of sockpuppets (or people from your organization told to upvote your posts/comments, which is the same thing as far as I’m concerned) for manipulating voting, the fact that it may get downvoted after I post this should not be taken as evidence by the audience of anything.
How do I know you’re using sockpuppets or human analogues? Because your upvotes are consistent across a given timeframe without regard to comment quality. Which is also why you noticed the fact that some of your 4-upvote comments were downvoted, because you worked to get them to 4.
ETA: See the asterisk?
Also, any administrators are welcome to check my upvote/downvote history. If necessary I’ll provide my password to an administrator to verify. (I’m not worried about being locked out of my account, because I can easily accumulate more upvotes, and anybody who dislikes me enough to want to do that probably wouldn’t desire me to lose my heard-earned reputation for being an annoying blowhard.)
Glad to see that whoever downvoted my previous submissions and comments happened to miss one, nice to know that. However, when my karma suddenly starts going down rapidly and goes down by a 100+ points, it generally indicates a downvoting wave.
Yup, I know that an asterisk shows up when I make edits. Thus, when I make any major edits, or when someone already responded to my comment, I add an EDIT note to them. When I make minor adjustments for grammar/spelling/phrasing, and when someone did not yet respond to my comment, I do not.
I did downvote some of them, but not, as a rule, those which engendered or contributed to the conversation.
And you apparently don’t understand what I was “clearly” describing there, so allow me to be clear: I used an openly hostile attack because it meant the weight of evidence was on -your- side. All you had to do to have no damage to your reputation was to say nothing at all, and my tirade would have been taken as unfair and hostile. Instead, you doubled down on exactly the wrong behaviors.
Ah, another lie from you combined with a masterful use of Dark Arts. You state here that:
I used an openly hostile attack because it meant the weight of evidence was on -your- side
However, in your previous comments, you clearly acknowledged that you used an openly hostile attack because it meant that the weight of evidence would be on the side of the person making the attack—you. Indeed, using an openly hostile attack anchors the “weight of public opinion” in your own words, on the side of the one making the attack. It primes the reader to agree, as we intuitively emotionally agree with the things we first come across, and have to use System 2 to force ourselves to disagree. So please avoid lying in the future. You’re really not doing yourself any favors by your blatant lies.
Ahem: It’s quite rude to downvote Vaniver even as you respond to him. Especially -twice-.
I thought his comments were not worth attention, following the general guidelines here.
Are you encouraging or discouraging me to elaborate?
I thought your original comments were not helpful for readers to gain useful information. I am encouraging you to elaborate and hope you will give a clear explanation of your position when you post.
I was insufficiently clear: that was a question about your model of my motivation, not what you want my motivation to be. You can say you want to hear more, but if you act against people saying things, which do you expect to have more impact?
But in the spirit of kindness I will write a longer response.
This subject is difficult to talk about because your support here is tepid and reluctant at best, and your detractors are polite.
Now, you might look at OrphanWilde or Clarity and say “you call that polite?”—no, I don’t. Those are the only people willing to break politeness and voice their lack of approval in detail. This anecdote about people talking in the quiet car comes to mind; lots of people look at something and realize “this is a problem” but only a few decide it’s worth the cost to speak up about it. Disproportionately, those are going to be people who feel the cost less strongly.
There’s a related common knowledge point—I might think this is likely net negative, but I don’t know how many other people think this is a likely net negative. Only if I know that lots of people think this is a likely net negative, and that they are also aware that this is the sentiment, does it make sense to be the spokesperson for that view. If I know about that dynamic, I can deliberately try to jumpstart the process by paying the costs of establishing common knowledge.
And so by writing a short comment I was hoping to get the best of both worlds—signalling that I think this is likely a net negative and that this is an opinion that should be public, without having to go into the awkward details of why.
That’s just the social dynamics. Let’s get to the actual content. Why do I think this is likely a net negative? Normally I would write something like this privately, but I’ll make it public because we’re already having a public discussion.
I agree that it would be nice if the broader population knew more clear thinking techniques. It’s not obvious to me that it would be nice if more of the broader population came to LW. I think that deliberative rationality, like discussed on LW, is mostly useful for people with lots of spare CPU cycles and a reflective personality.
Once, I shared some bread I baked with my then-landlord. She liked it, and asked me how I made it, and I said “oh, it’s really easy, let me lend you the book I learned from.” She demurred; she didn’t like reading things, and learned much better watching people do things. Sure, I said, and invited her over the next time I baked some to show her how it’s done.
The Sequences is very much “The Way for software engineer-types as radioed back by Eliezer Yudkowsky.” I am pessimistic about attempts to get other types of people closer to The Way by translating The Sequences into a language closer to theirs; much more than just the language needs to change, because the inferential gaps are in different places. I strongly suspect your ‘typical American’ with IQ 100 would get more out of The Way as radioed back by someone closer to them. Byron Katie, with her workshops and her Youtube videos, is the sort of person I would model after if I was targeting a broad market.
I have not paid close attention to the material you’ve produced because I find it painful. From what little I have seen, I have mostly gotten the impression that it’s poorly presented, and am some combination of unwilling and unable to provide you detailed criticism on why. I also think this is more than that I’m not the target audience—I don’t have the negative reaction to pjeby that many do, for example, and he has much more of a self-help-style popular approach. To recklessly speculate on the underlying causes, I don’t get the impression that you deeply respect or understand your audience, and what you think they want doesn’t line up with what they actually want, in a way that seems transparent. It seems like How do you do, fellow kids?.
Standard writing advice is “write what you know.” If you want to do rationality for college professors, great! I imagine that your comparative advantage at that would be higher. But just because you don’t see people pointing rationality at the masses doesn’t mean that’s a hole you would be any good at filling. Among other things, I would worry that because you’re not the target audience, you won’t be aware of what’s already there / what your competition is.
Thank you for actually engaging with the content.
The same effect works if people think this is a net positive. Furthermore, Less Wrong is a quite critical community, with people much more likely to provide criticism than support, as the latter wins less social status points. This is not to cast aspersions on the community at all—there’s a reason I participate actively. I like being challenged and updating my beliefs. But let’s be honest, this is a community of challenge and debate, not warm fuzzies and kumbayah.
Now let’s get to the meat of the matter.
I agree that it would not be nice if more of the broader population came to LW, the inferential gap would be way too big, and Endless September sucks. I discuss more in my comment here how that is not the goal I am pursuing, together with other InIn participants. The goal is to simply convey more clear thinking techniques effectively to the broad audience and raise the sanity waterline. For a select few, as that comment describes, they can go up to LW, likely those with a significantly high IQ but lack of sufficient education about how their mind works.
I am confused by this comment. If I didn’t understand my audience, how come my articles are so successful with them? Believe me, I have extensively researched the audiences there, and how to engage them well. You fail at my mind if you think my writing would be only engaging to college professors. And please consider who you are talking to when you discuss writing advice. I have read many books about writing, and taught writing as part of my college teaching.
As proof, here is evidence. I have only started publishing on Lifehacker—published 3 so far—and my articles way outperform the average of being shared under 1K. This is the average for experienced and non-experienced writers alike. My articles have all been shared over 1K times, and some twice as much if not more. The fact that they are shared so widely is demonstrable evidence that I understand my audience and engage it well.
Has this caused you to update on any of your claims to any extent?
You’re welcome! Thank you for continuing to be polite.
I was already aware of how many times your articles have been shared. I would not base my judgment of a painter’s skill with the brush on how many books on painting they had read.
I guess the metaphor I would take for the painter is how many of her paintings have sold. That’s the appropriate metaphor for how many times the articles were shared. If the painter’s goal is to sell paintings with specific content—as it is my goal to have articles shared with specific content not typically read by an ordinary person—then sharing of articles widely indicates success.
+1
I thought upvotes were used for that purpose.
By design, upvotes don’t show public approval. Commenting +1 does.
Ah, good point
...yes, and?
No, you were angry that he was criticizing you. You have consistently downvoted everyone who criticized you.
I see that you can read my mind and my votes. Glad you have that ability. Can you please provide evidence of what I am thinking and how I am voting? Thanks!
You can’t and you won’t. Your statements are patently false. I have in fact not consistently downvoted everyone who criticized me. I try to follow the general guidelines on voting. Please avoid making false statements in the future.
Anyway, not really interested in engaging in a conversation where you have vague accusations again, which are part of your general agenda against Intentional Insights, including making abusive/trollish claims, as you have previously explicitly acknowledged your intentions to be.
EDIT: Edited to include the link to the general guidelines on voting.
It’s part of the Dark Arts package. I’ll dryly observe that I knew you downvoted him—how do you think I knew that you downvoted him? It’s not like downvotes come with names attached. Yes, I can “read your mind”, which is to say, I read the -massive- amounts of connotation information associated with otherwise bland text.
You, uh, admitted to it? “I thought his comments were not worth attention”
If it helps to know, extra downvotes your getting specifically in this thread, but not other ones, are coming from me. This comment isn’t meant as a glib statement to signal my affective disapproval. I just think this conversation is going nowhere, and think the quality of dialogue is getting worse. I’m downvoting these comments as I would others. I’m commenting so you know why I’m downvoting, and don’t cast aspersions at other users.
Thanks for letting me know!
I can generally tell where downvotes are coming from. The aspersion I threw at Gleb is that he is, as far as I can tell, using sockpuppet accounts to upvote his own stuff (when he thinks it’s important). Complaining about my own downvotes would be petty and counterproductive. (Particularly since my total karma score remains unchanged from the beginning of this debacle. It was up 100 at one point, but dropped back down.)
I understand you use posturing and accusations without evidence as part of your Dark Arts arsenal, and accept that. I doubt anyone will come across this comment, since it’s so far down and the thread is not new. Just wanted you to know personally, in case you aren’t simply posturing, that I don’t use sockpuppets. I have a number of Less Wronger friends who support the cause of spreading rational thinking broadly, and whenever I make significant posts or particularly salient comments, I let them know, so that they can give me optimizing suggestions and feedback.
Since they happen to share many of my views, they sometimes upvote my comments. They generally don’t participate actively, and this is a rare exception on the part of Raelifin, as they do not want to be caught in the backlash. So FYI for the future. Feel free to continue making these accusations for Dark Arts purposes if you wish, but I just wanted you to know.
The term for extreme versions of this is “meatpuppet”. Of course having friends is not the same thing as having meatpuppets, and I have no way of knowing to what extent your friends are LW participants who just happen to be your friends and would have upvoted your articles anyway, and to what extent they’re people who come here only to upvote your articles for you. The nearer the latter, the more meatpuppety.
Well, didn’t expect other people besides myself and OrphanWilde to still be reading this thread, updating on that.
The people who I’m talking about are LW participants, I wouldn’t ask them to give me feedback and advice on my writing and engagement otherwise, what’s the point of doing so? To be clear, far from all of them upvote my comments, as they don’t agree with everything I write, of course. And my point in bringing their attention to it is for me to improve my communication, and also help myself update. It’s harder to update when things are said in a hostile way by faceless LW commenters, but my friends can provide me with a trusted external perspective on things. They do tend to agree with most stuff, sometimes choose to upvote, and rarely comment, for the reasons stated above.
I’m sharing all of this for the sake of transparency, as this is a strong value I hold. Not something I had to share, and I know it arouses suspicions, but this is my choice due to my personal value system.
LOL. So no sockpuppets but a cheerleading squad on call..? X-)
I responded about this above.
As I stated above, I am committed to transparency and openness, which is why I acknowledged downvoting the comments from Vaniver.
Your lie was the following:
I have specific evidence that I actually upvoted some people who made statements not friendly to me when I thought they made good points worthy of public consideration. Please avoid lying in the future. It really harms your reputation.
I don’t have a reputation to protect, or at least not a terribly positive one (indeed, I dislike having a positive reputation, because it makes it costly to abandon it). I do believe I previously advised you on the benefits and drawbacks of that.
And now I see someone went through and downvoted all of my previous posts and comments. I suppose it wasn’t you, because your mastery of Dark Arts would enable you to find more creative ways of harming InIn and me.
Or who knows, maybe it was you. Hard to tell at this point. Not very familiar at all with these sorts of underhanded strategies and mind games and deliberate efforts to attack my reputation on Less Wrong, as you clearly describe here is your intention.
This paragraph feels passive-aggressive to me. If you think you got mass downvoted tell Nancy and she can ask Trike Apps for the perpetrator.
Oh, thanks for letting me know about this option, appreciate it!
I wrote that last part when I was in a state of frustration due to the downvoting, so I wasn’t being as conscious about my writing as I usually am.
You realize that when you edit your comments, an asterisk shows up? Because I tire of your rather boring and predictable approach to Dark Arts, I’ll go ahead and head this one off: I didn’t downvote all of your previous posts and comments, I downvoted those here, in this post, where you were spamming. Additionally, a lazy look through your profile turns up several posts and comments which, quite definitively, were not downvoted. If your upvotes have taken a shock, it’s because of your behavior, not a downvote bot.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mvw/improving_the_effectiveness_of_effective_altruism/ for one example of a non-downvoted post from the first page of your posts. Given your rather blatant use of sockpuppets (or people from your organization told to upvote your posts/comments, which is the same thing as far as I’m concerned) for manipulating voting, the fact that it may get downvoted after I post this should not be taken as evidence by the audience of anything.
How do I know you’re using sockpuppets or human analogues? Because your upvotes are consistent across a given timeframe without regard to comment quality. Which is also why you noticed the fact that some of your 4-upvote comments were downvoted, because you worked to get them to 4.
ETA: See the asterisk?
Also, any administrators are welcome to check my upvote/downvote history. If necessary I’ll provide my password to an administrator to verify. (I’m not worried about being locked out of my account, because I can easily accumulate more upvotes, and anybody who dislikes me enough to want to do that probably wouldn’t desire me to lose my heard-earned reputation for being an annoying blowhard.)
In cases like that, cite the post you are replying to.
Glad to see that whoever downvoted my previous submissions and comments happened to miss one, nice to know that. However, when my karma suddenly starts going down rapidly and goes down by a 100+ points, it generally indicates a downvoting wave.
Yup, I know that an asterisk shows up when I make edits. Thus, when I make any major edits, or when someone already responded to my comment, I add an EDIT note to them. When I make minor adjustments for grammar/spelling/phrasing, and when someone did not yet respond to my comment, I do not.
Really.
I did downvote some of them, but not, as a rule, those which engendered or contributed to the conversation.
And you apparently don’t understand what I was “clearly” describing there, so allow me to be clear: I used an openly hostile attack because it meant the weight of evidence was on -your- side. All you had to do to have no damage to your reputation was to say nothing at all, and my tirade would have been taken as unfair and hostile. Instead, you doubled down on exactly the wrong behaviors.
Ah, another lie from you combined with a masterful use of Dark Arts. You state here that:
However, in your previous comments, you clearly acknowledged that you used an openly hostile attack because it meant that the weight of evidence would be on the side of the person making the attack—you. Indeed, using an openly hostile attack anchors the “weight of public opinion” in your own words, on the side of the one making the attack. It primes the reader to agree, as we intuitively emotionally agree with the things we first come across, and have to use System 2 to force ourselves to disagree. So please avoid lying in the future. You’re really not doing yourself any favors by your blatant lies.