Agreed that making a statement and not giving any supporting evidence doesn’t qualify as “rational.” I actually haven’t found the quality of your argument to be low, most of the time, but I’ll try to dredge up some examples of what I think wedrifid is talking about.
If you look back to my original post to arran, I state that there are multiple definitions of a paradox and all are acceptable. That what is fruitful is not trying to argue about which definition is correct, but to accept the plurality and try to learn a new point of reference from the one you have been trained in.
The standard mindset on LessWrong is that words are useful because they are specific and thus transmit the same concept between two people. Some words are more abstract than others (for example, ‘beauty’ can never be defined as specifically as ‘apple’), but the idea that we should embrace more possible definitions of a word goes deeply against LessWrong philosophy. It makes language less clear; a speaker will have to specify that “no, I’m talking about paradox2, not paradox1.” In which case you might as well have 2 different words for the 2 different concepts in the first place. I think most people on LW would count this as a negative epistemic contribution
Doesn’t that strike you as very akin to soviet russia style censorship?
This kind of comparison is very no-no on LessWrong, unless you very thoroughly explain all the similarities and justify why you think it’s a good comparison. See Politics is the Mind-Killer.
You can fight for the definitions you have been indoctrinated in, and in doing so fight to label me as wrong, or we can have a real dialogue.
Comes across as belligerant.
I don’t think there are really that many places where you had ‘bad’ arguments. The main thing is that you’re presenting a viewpoint very different from the established one here, and you’re using non-LW vocabulary (or vocabulary that is used here, but you’re using it differently as per your field of study), and when someone disagrees you start arguing about definitions, and so people pattern-match to ‘bad argument.’
Agreed that making a statement and not giving any supporting evidence doesn’t qualify as “rational.” I actually haven’t found the quality of your argument to be low, most of the time, but I’ll try to dredge up some examples of what I think wedrifid is talking about.
The standard mindset on LessWrong is that words are useful because they are specific and thus transmit the same concept between two people. Some words are more abstract than others (for example, ‘beauty’ can never be defined as specifically as ‘apple’), but the idea that we should embrace more possible definitions of a word goes deeply against LessWrong philosophy. It makes language less clear; a speaker will have to specify that “no, I’m talking about paradox2, not paradox1.” In which case you might as well have 2 different words for the 2 different concepts in the first place. I think most people on LW would count this as a negative epistemic contribution
This kind of comparison is very no-no on LessWrong, unless you very thoroughly explain all the similarities and justify why you think it’s a good comparison. See Politics is the Mind-Killer.
Comes across as belligerant.
I don’t think there are really that many places where you had ‘bad’ arguments. The main thing is that you’re presenting a viewpoint very different from the established one here, and you’re using non-LW vocabulary (or vocabulary that is used here, but you’re using it differently as per your field of study), and when someone disagrees you start arguing about definitions, and so people pattern-match to ‘bad argument.’