Ah, thank you for digging into argumentation! It’s been discouraging to see Brendan Long misrepresent what I said. I mentioned in my earlier response to Gears, a little ways up in this thread: “If I am removed for this, you are well within your rights” I understand that this is your space, not mine, and if you don’t want my contribution, you have authority to remove it. You’ve chosen downvoting as your proxy-metric for detecting fallacies and discontent; you are allowed to do that (despite, as you’ve also noticed, it is easily hacked by downvote-mafias; it’s been Goodharted… so I don’t see why you guys keep it, except for inertia and lack of initiative to do real moderation of fallacies?).
At the same time, the rest of the world is well within their rights to assess your community for having a bubble, where an argument is allowed unless it has emotions or artistic expression or humor. You should think carefully how you brand yourself, before claiming that your bubble is correct.
To your concern that the community devolve, without critique of appropriateness and tone—I also mentioned that earlier, too :) Again, responding to Gears, above: ”...without addressing the substance of the argument. Consider if, in the extreme, I was downvoted or dismissed for not following MLA formatting, without mention of the content? ” (emph. added) There, you can see I pointed-out twice that the issue was not a discussion of tone or appropriateness, itself; rather, it’s the use of a ‘tone-police’ to avoid addressing the actual argument. By attacking the validity of the speaker (an ‘ad hominem attack’) these commenters hope to dodge rebuttal; I have encountered them repeatedly in Lesswrong, ACX, and EA Forum, and the contrast with the moderated forums of the 90s is stunning.
We used to respond with a post, pointing out the fallacy, so that the trolls couldn’t get away with it. Your community lets the trolls become a downvote-mafia, and then this group uses their Goodharted downvote-proxy as justification to ignore the arguments. This has happened to the extent that other commenters eventually did point-out that I was being strawmanned, in other threads, and a few more folks sent me direct messages through the forum saying they’d encountered the same. It sounds like you are already the free-for-all, and my satire won’t change that.
Ah, thank you for digging into argumentation! It’s been discouraging to see Brendan Long misrepresent what I said. I mentioned in my earlier response to Gears, a little ways up in this thread: “If I am removed for this, you are well within your rights” I understand that this is your space, not mine, and if you don’t want my contribution, you have authority to remove it. You’ve chosen downvoting as your proxy-metric for detecting fallacies and discontent; you are allowed to do that (despite, as you’ve also noticed, it is easily hacked by downvote-mafias; it’s been Goodharted… so I don’t see why you guys keep it, except for inertia and lack of initiative to do real moderation of fallacies?).
At the same time, the rest of the world is well within their rights to assess your community for having a bubble, where an argument is allowed unless it has emotions or artistic expression or humor. You should think carefully how you brand yourself, before claiming that your bubble is correct.
To your concern that the community devolve, without critique of appropriateness and tone—I also mentioned that earlier, too :) Again, responding to Gears, above: ”...without addressing the substance of the argument. Consider if, in the extreme, I was downvoted or dismissed for not following MLA formatting, without mention of the content? ” (emph. added) There, you can see I pointed-out twice that the issue was not a discussion of tone or appropriateness, itself; rather, it’s the use of a ‘tone-police’ to avoid addressing the actual argument. By attacking the validity of the speaker (an ‘ad hominem attack’) these commenters hope to dodge rebuttal; I have encountered them repeatedly in Lesswrong, ACX, and EA Forum, and the contrast with the moderated forums of the 90s is stunning.
We used to respond with a post, pointing out the fallacy, so that the trolls couldn’t get away with it. Your community lets the trolls become a downvote-mafia, and then this group uses their Goodharted downvote-proxy as justification to ignore the arguments. This has happened to the extent that other commenters eventually did point-out that I was being strawmanned, in other threads, and a few more folks sent me direct messages through the forum saying they’d encountered the same. It sounds like you are already the free-for-all, and my satire won’t change that.