while I do have at least one more example of Zack doing this thing in mind
Did you mean to link to this comment? Or another of his comments on that post…? It is not clear to me, on a skim of the comments, which specific thing that Zack wrote there might be an example of “lying by exaggeration/overconfidence” (but I could easily have missed it; there’s a good number of comments on that post).
I do think Zack fairly frequently does a “Write a reply to a person’s post as if it’s a rebuttal to the post, which mostly goes off and talks about an unrelated problem/frame that Zack cares about without engaging with what the original author was really talking about.”
Hmm. Certainly the first part of that is true, but I’m not convinced of the second part (“without engaging with what the original author was really talking about”). For example, you mention the post “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think”. I found that said post expressed objections and thoughts that I had when reading Eliezer’s “Meta-Honesty” post, so it seems strange to say that Zack’s post didn’t engage with what Eliezer wrote! (Unless you take the view that what Eliezer was “really talking about” was something different than anything that either Zack or I took from his post? But then it seems to me that it’s hardly fair to blame Zack / me / any other reader of the post; surely the reply to complaints should be “well, you failed to get across what you had in mind, clearly; unfortunate, but perhaps try again”.)
Of course, you do say that you “don’t think there’s a concrete thing that’s deceptive” about Zack’s “Firming Up Not Lying” post. Alright, then is there some non-concrete thing that’s deceptive? Is there any way in which the post can be said to be “deceptive”, such that a reasonable person would agree with the usage of the word, and that it’s a bad thing? The accusation can’t just be “it feels slightly off”. That’s not anything.
In this particular post, I think there’s a particular sleight-of-hand about word definitions I can point to as feeling particularly misleading.
This seems like exactly the sort of problem that’s addressed by writing a critical comment in the post’s comments section! (Which comment can then be replied to, by the post’s author and by other commenters, by means of which discussion we might all—or so one hopes—become less wrong.)
Did you mean to link to this comment? Or another of his comments on that post…? It is not clear to me, on a skim of the comments, which specific thing that Zack wrote there might be an example of “lying by exaggeration/overconfidence” (but I could easily have missed it; there’s a good number of comments on that post).
Hmm. Certainly the first part of that is true, but I’m not convinced of the second part (“without engaging with what the original author was really talking about”). For example, you mention the post “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think”. I found that said post expressed objections and thoughts that I had when reading Eliezer’s “Meta-Honesty” post, so it seems strange to say that Zack’s post didn’t engage with what Eliezer wrote! (Unless you take the view that what Eliezer was “really talking about” was something different than anything that either Zack or I took from his post? But then it seems to me that it’s hardly fair to blame Zack / me / any other reader of the post; surely the reply to complaints should be “well, you failed to get across what you had in mind, clearly; unfortunate, but perhaps try again”.)
Of course, you do say that you “don’t think there’s a concrete thing that’s deceptive” about Zack’s “Firming Up Not Lying” post. Alright, then is there some non-concrete thing that’s deceptive? Is there any way in which the post can be said to be “deceptive”, such that a reasonable person would agree with the usage of the word, and that it’s a bad thing? The accusation can’t just be “it feels slightly off”. That’s not anything.
This seems like exactly the sort of problem that’s addressed by writing a critical comment in the post’s comments section! (Which comment can then be replied to, by the post’s author and by other commenters, by means of which discussion we might all—or so one hopes—become less wrong.)