(Sorry for triple reply, trying to keep threads separate such that each can be responded to individually.)
what the most serious weaknesses of your argument are
I claim that the LW of 2023 is worse at correctly identifying the most serious weaknesses of a given argument than the LW of 2018.
Relative to the LW of 2018, I have the subjective sense that there’s much much more strawmanning and zeroing-in-on-non-cruxes and eliding the distinctions between “A somewhat implies B,” “A strongly implies B,” and “A is tantamount to B.”
I would genuinely expect that a hypothetical LWer who gets the gist of my arguments mostly from comments written in disagreement is, in fact, getting the gist of a cardboard cutout created by people who (say) don’t actually read the thing that I wrote, but instead spend a few minutes on the first paragraph and then leap to reply “this is insane.”
(That user has since apologized for that specific thing that they did, and I wouldn’t harp on it except that I think it’s genuinely representative of, and emblematic of, the thing that LW is more of now than it used to be five years ago. The recent response to my Basics post, for instance, contained loads and loads of stuff that I straightforwardly agree with, presented as if it was contra my claims, and it simply wasn’t.)
A user who waits to read the top couple of disagreeing comments is a user who’s gonna very quickly build a shoulder strawman without even noticing that that’s what they’re doing.
FYI I think I disagree with the 2018 vs 2023 claim here, I think everything you’re pointing at was in fact worse in 2018 (i.e. there were more users actively pushing for it, and most of them kinda left since then)
I would trust you to have a better sense of the overall LW experience, so this is evidence that this might be a my-posts problem, but it’s definitely gotten worse for me specifically. It was not this hard to get people to let go of their strawmen even with stuff like Punch Bug (which is a topic people have very strong preconceptions and feelings about).
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the shift was from [zero] to [large number]. More wanted to gesture at a shift from [moderate number] to [large number].
Like, there’s the difference between viscerally expecting one in four essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 10 lasting for a day or two, and viscerally expecting two in three essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 30 lasting for four days.
If the “ban commenter” function had not been implemented, I wouldn’t have posted any of my last five or six essays, and would be already gone.
(Sorry for triple reply, trying to keep threads separate such that each can be responded to individually.)
I claim that the LW of 2023 is worse at correctly identifying the most serious weaknesses of a given argument than the LW of 2018.
Relative to the LW of 2018, I have the subjective sense that there’s much much more strawmanning and zeroing-in-on-non-cruxes and eliding the distinctions between “A somewhat implies B,” “A strongly implies B,” and “A is tantamount to B.”
I would genuinely expect that a hypothetical LWer who gets the gist of my arguments mostly from comments written in disagreement is, in fact, getting the gist of a cardboard cutout created by people who (say) don’t actually read the thing that I wrote, but instead spend a few minutes on the first paragraph and then leap to reply “this is insane.”
(That user has since apologized for that specific thing that they did, and I wouldn’t harp on it except that I think it’s genuinely representative of, and emblematic of, the thing that LW is more of now than it used to be five years ago. The recent response to my Basics post, for instance, contained loads and loads of stuff that I straightforwardly agree with, presented as if it was contra my claims, and it simply wasn’t.)
A user who waits to read the top couple of disagreeing comments is a user who’s gonna very quickly build a shoulder strawman without even noticing that that’s what they’re doing.
FYI I think I disagree with the 2018 vs 2023 claim here, I think everything you’re pointing at was in fact worse in 2018 (i.e. there were more users actively pushing for it, and most of them kinda left since then)
I would trust you to have a better sense of the overall LW experience, so this is evidence that this might be a my-posts problem, but it’s definitely gotten worse for me specifically. It was not this hard to get people to let go of their strawmen even with stuff like Punch Bug (which is a topic people have very strong preconceptions and feelings about).
Huh. I am surprised about that.
From another comment on this post: