I disagree with the heavy implicit assumption running throughout your post that you know better than I do what’s going on inside my head, that you have put more thought into this than I, and that you understand people in general better than I. I also note that you’ve made your model of me essentially unfalsifiable—you assert that X must be true of me because it’s so normal and representative of How Humans Work, and you leave no path for me to get in contact with your uncertainty and demonstrate that you’re wrong.
(These are rationality sins in my opinion.)
I temper that disagreement with the fact that I am crediting you with predictive power these days, but I notice that you and others are not writing and did not bother to write hundreds of words to chill or disincentivize or disendorse behavior that was an order of magnitude worse, and so I find the impassioned call for correction hollow.
If you find my one tiny parenthetical worth this entire long response, but none of the actual abuse that I received in the other thread and on Tumblr worth objecting to directly, then I cannot help but object to your priorities. You’ve put substantially more effort into a combination of reprimand and trying-to-change-Duncan’s-models than you have into decrying calls for my suicide.
The majority of my post consisted of specific empirical predictions which were not about the contents of your head. Whether I am mistaken about why you are doing what you’re doing changes nothing about what the effects of your behaviour are likely to be. To the extent it was about the contents of your head it was addressing a conflict I perceived between the likely outcomes of your behavior and the goals you have elsewhere explicitly given for that behaviour. I concede that if in fact you intend the consequences I predict above then there is no point in my having written them down. Otherwise, I disagree that this is something I ought not do.
As to your complaints about who I choose to try to reason with: I don’t expect to be able to reason with trolls, and don’t expect the community to need me to*. Moreover I do not care to reason with them: I care to have them leave. Long and careful arguments are not what seems best to accomplish that goal. You, however, are a largely reasonable person I largely respect, and one who I would not like to drive out of the community, so when I see you doing something I think is a mistake, it might seem worth my time to engage with you and try to convince you not to. I am much more interested in engaging with my friends than my enemies, even if my friends are already better people than my enemies.
In any case, this is not a contest of who is a better person. Perhaps my priorities are indeed misaligned. This does not mean my assessment of the likely consequences of your actions is wrong.
*though as it happens I spent much of my next several comments on the original post saying things to that one troll like “I would hope the community would shun you” and “I still would not want you, personally, in any community I’m part of, because your behavior is bad.” I deny that it is necessary that I have done this as a precondition for being worth listening to, but in fact I did. In the interests of keeping my handles separate I will not comment on whether or how I responded to anything on tumblr or elsewhere.
Yeah, I really don’t want to do this personally, but it may be time to pull out the big guns and actually find direct quotes from the Tumblrites. I think people who didn’t see the Tumblr commentary are still underestimating how bad it was.
I have seen a great deal of the tumblr commentary, and commentary elsewhere, and had seen it before writing my comment. I agree much of it was extremely vicious, and perhaps there is worse than the “he should kill himself” one which I have not seen. This changes nothing about the likely consequences of Duncan’s snark. It makes that snark more forgivable, certainly; I don’t think Duncan is a bad person for responding to attacks with moderate snark. But I do nevertheless think that said snark is harmful, and since Duncan is a person who I respect, I think it worth my time to suggest this to him.
I disagree with the heavy implicit assumption running throughout your post that you know better than I do what’s going on inside my head, that you have put more thought into this than I, and that you understand people in general better than I. I also note that you’ve made your model of me essentially unfalsifiable—you assert that X must be true of me because it’s so normal and representative of How Humans Work, and you leave no path for me to get in contact with your uncertainty and demonstrate that you’re wrong.
(These are rationality sins in my opinion.)
I temper that disagreement with the fact that I am crediting you with predictive power these days, but I notice that you and others are not writing and did not bother to write hundreds of words to chill or disincentivize or disendorse behavior that was an order of magnitude worse, and so I find the impassioned call for correction hollow.
If you find my one tiny parenthetical worth this entire long response, but none of the actual abuse that I received in the other thread and on Tumblr worth objecting to directly, then I cannot help but object to your priorities. You’ve put substantially more effort into a combination of reprimand and trying-to-change-Duncan’s-models than you have into decrying calls for my suicide.
The majority of my post consisted of specific empirical predictions which were not about the contents of your head. Whether I am mistaken about why you are doing what you’re doing changes nothing about what the effects of your behaviour are likely to be. To the extent it was about the contents of your head it was addressing a conflict I perceived between the likely outcomes of your behavior and the goals you have elsewhere explicitly given for that behaviour. I concede that if in fact you intend the consequences I predict above then there is no point in my having written them down. Otherwise, I disagree that this is something I ought not do.
As to your complaints about who I choose to try to reason with: I don’t expect to be able to reason with trolls, and don’t expect the community to need me to*. Moreover I do not care to reason with them: I care to have them leave. Long and careful arguments are not what seems best to accomplish that goal. You, however, are a largely reasonable person I largely respect, and one who I would not like to drive out of the community, so when I see you doing something I think is a mistake, it might seem worth my time to engage with you and try to convince you not to. I am much more interested in engaging with my friends than my enemies, even if my friends are already better people than my enemies.
In any case, this is not a contest of who is a better person. Perhaps my priorities are indeed misaligned. This does not mean my assessment of the likely consequences of your actions is wrong.
*though as it happens I spent much of my next several comments on the original post saying things to that one troll like “I would hope the community would shun you” and “I still would not want you, personally, in any community I’m part of, because your behavior is bad.” I deny that it is necessary that I have done this as a precondition for being worth listening to, but in fact I did. In the interests of keeping my handles separate I will not comment on whether or how I responded to anything on tumblr or elsewhere.
Yeah, I really don’t want to do this personally, but it may be time to pull out the big guns and actually find direct quotes from the Tumblrites. I think people who didn’t see the Tumblr commentary are still underestimating how bad it was.
I have seen a great deal of the tumblr commentary, and commentary elsewhere, and had seen it before writing my comment. I agree much of it was extremely vicious, and perhaps there is worse than the “he should kill himself” one which I have not seen. This changes nothing about the likely consequences of Duncan’s snark. It makes that snark more forgivable, certainly; I don’t think Duncan is a bad person for responding to attacks with moderate snark. But I do nevertheless think that said snark is harmful, and since Duncan is a person who I respect, I think it worth my time to suggest this to him.
How would that help resolve this particular conflict?