First you claimed there was bias involved in eating animals. It is eminently reasonable to interpret your responses as being connected to that claim.
No, it isn’t at all reasonable. My comment was a direct reply to Eliezer’s and was explicitly addressed as an answer to his rationale for downvoting my comment. You need to make an effort to keep the separate strands of the debate separate, otherwise you’ll misinterpret the structure of the different arguments.
If I was in error, and you have no care at all about eating animals
Wait, why does it follow from my saying you were in error that I had “no care at all about eating animals”?
That you can easily generate past examples of the 1% where they are not bullshit is not an argument for not downvoting such claims—any more than you easily generating examples of past lottery winners is an argument to play the lottery.
I didn’t claim in this context that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for not downvoting such claims. I claimed that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for concluding that Eliezer’s claim was false.
For my actual views on the appropriateness of downvoting such comments, see the other subthreads in this debate.
There is a prescriptive/descriptive divide here, and it does us no good to dance either side of it.
Descriptively:
Eliezer’s claim that comments of that form will get downvoted may be factually incorrect, given that it’s possible to, as you showed, create comments of that form that express sentiments most people would upvote.
The qualifier “almost” placed in front of his comment would suffice to cover these situations.
Prescriptively:
I don’t think that any comment that fits that form should be “automatically [...] downvoted to oblivion”
is a prescriptive statement, and one which I attempted to explain was wrong.
We are tripping over this divide, and several different meanings of ‘wrong’. Basically, we’re making different distinctions to each other, and probably ascribing incorrect intentions to each other. Are there any other possible mismatches I haven’t noticed?
No, it isn’t at all reasonable. My comment was a direct reply to Eliezer’s and was explicitly addressed as an answer to his rationale for downvoting my comment. You need to make an effort to keep the separate strands of the debate separate, otherwise you’ll misinterpret the structure of the different arguments.
Wait, why does it follow from my saying you were in error that I had “no care at all about eating animals”?
I didn’t claim in this context that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for not downvoting such claims. I claimed that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for concluding that Eliezer’s claim was false.
For my actual views on the appropriateness of downvoting such comments, see the other subthreads in this debate.
There is a prescriptive/descriptive divide here, and it does us no good to dance either side of it.
Descriptively:
Eliezer’s claim that comments of that form will get downvoted may be factually incorrect, given that it’s possible to, as you showed, create comments of that form that express sentiments most people would upvote.
The qualifier “almost” placed in front of his comment would suffice to cover these situations.
Prescriptively:
is a prescriptive statement, and one which I attempted to explain was wrong.
We are tripping over this divide, and several different meanings of ‘wrong’. Basically, we’re making different distinctions to each other, and probably ascribing incorrect intentions to each other. Are there any other possible mismatches I haven’t noticed?