This is ignoring the fact that you’re highly skilled at deluding and confusing your audience into thinking that what the original author wrote was X, when they actually wrote a much less stupid or much less bad Y.
This does not seem like it should be possible for arbitrary X and Y, and so if Zack manages to pull it off in some cases, it seems likely that those cases are precisely those in which the original post’s claims were somewhat fuzzy or ill-characterized—
(not necessarily through the fault of the author! perhaps the subject matter itself is simply fuzzy and hard to characterize!)
—in which case it seems that devoting more cognitive effort (and words) to the topic might be a useful sort of thing to do, in general? I don’t think one needs to resort to a hypothesis of active malice or antipathy to explain this effect; I think people writing about confusing things is generally a good thing (and if that writing ends up being highly upvoted, I’m generally suspicious of explanations like “the author is really, really good at confusing people” when “the subject itself was confusing to begin with” seems like a strictly simpler explanation).
(Considering the general problem of how forum moderation should work, rather than my specific guilt or innocence in the dispute at hand) I think positing non-truth-tracking motivations (which can be more general than “malice or antipathy”) makes sense, and that there is a real problem here: namely, that what I called “the culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse” in the great-grandparent grants a structural advantage to people who have more time to burn arguing on the internet, analogously to how adversarial court systems grant a structural advantage to litigants who can afford a better lawyer.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see any solutions to this problem that don’t themselves have much more serious problems? Realistically, I think just letting the debate or trial process play out (including the motivated efforts of slick commenters or lawyers) results in better shared maps than trusting a benevolent moderator or judge to decide who deserves to speak.
To the extent that Less Wrong has the potential to do better than other forums, I think it’s because our culture and userbase is analogous to a court with a savvier, more intelligent jury (that requires lawyers to make solid arguments, rather than just appealing to their prejudices), not because we’ve moved beyond the need for non-collaborative debate (even though idealized Bayesian reasoners would not need to debate).
(It’s not a hypothesis; Zack makes his antipathy in these cases fairly explicit, e.g. “this is the egregore I’m fighting against tooth and nail” or similar. Generally speaking, I have not found Zack’s writing to be confusion-inducing when it’s not coming from his being triggered or angry or defensive or what-have-you.)
This does not seem like it should be possible for arbitrary X and Y, and so if Zack manages to pull it off in some cases, it seems likely that those cases are precisely those in which the original post’s claims were somewhat fuzzy or ill-characterized—
(not necessarily through the fault of the author! perhaps the subject matter itself is simply fuzzy and hard to characterize!)
—in which case it seems that devoting more cognitive effort (and words) to the topic might be a useful sort of thing to do, in general? I don’t think one needs to resort to a hypothesis of active malice or antipathy to explain this effect; I think people writing about confusing things is generally a good thing (and if that writing ends up being highly upvoted, I’m generally suspicious of explanations like “the author is really, really good at confusing people” when “the subject itself was confusing to begin with” seems like a strictly simpler explanation).
(Considering the general problem of how forum moderation should work, rather than my specific guilt or innocence in the dispute at hand) I think positing non-truth-tracking motivations (which can be more general than “malice or antipathy”) makes sense, and that there is a real problem here: namely, that what I called “the culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse” in the great-grandparent grants a structural advantage to people who have more time to burn arguing on the internet, analogously to how adversarial court systems grant a structural advantage to litigants who can afford a better lawyer.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see any solutions to this problem that don’t themselves have much more serious problems? Realistically, I think just letting the debate or trial process play out (including the motivated efforts of slick commenters or lawyers) results in better shared maps than trusting a benevolent moderator or judge to decide who deserves to speak.
To the extent that Less Wrong has the potential to do better than other forums, I think it’s because our culture and userbase is analogous to a court with a savvier, more intelligent jury (that requires lawyers to make solid arguments, rather than just appealing to their prejudices), not because we’ve moved beyond the need for non-collaborative debate (even though idealized Bayesian reasoners would not need to debate).
(It’s not a hypothesis; Zack makes his antipathy in these cases fairly explicit, e.g. “this is the egregore I’m fighting against tooth and nail” or similar. Generally speaking, I have not found Zack’s writing to be confusion-inducing when it’s not coming from his being triggered or angry or defensive or what-have-you.)