It is as if Zack sees, in the claim “hey, ‘this seems insane to me’ is both truer and more effective than ‘this is insane’, you should consider updating your overall language heuristics to account for this delta across all sorts of utterances” an attempt to imprison or brainwash him, much like the more stringent objections to pronoun preferences …
Isn’t it, though?
Probabilistically speaking, I mean. Usually, when people say such things (“you should consider updating your overall language heuristics”, etc.) to you, they are in fact your enemies, and the game-theoretically correct response is disproportionate hostility.
Now, that’s “usually”, and not “always”; and such things are in any case a matter of degree; and there are different classes of “enemies”; and “disproportionate hostility” may have various downsides, dictated by circumstances; and there are other caveats besides.
But, at the very least, you cannot truthfully claim that the all-caps sort of hostile response is entirely irrational in such cases—that it can only be caused by “a trauma-response type overreaction” (or something similar).
There probably exists a word or phrase for the disingenuous maneuver Said is making, here, of pretending as if we’re not talking about interactions between me and Zack and Rob (or more broadly, interactions between individuals in the filtered bubble of LessWrong, with the explicit context of arguing about norms within that highly filtered bubble) and acting as if just straightforwardly importing priors and strategies from [the broader internet] or [people in general] is reasonable.
Probably, but I’m not calling it to mind as easily as I’m calling the word “strawmanning,” which is what’s happening in Said’s last paragraph, where he pretends as if I had claimed that the all-caps sort of hostile response was entirely irrational in such cases, so as to make it seem like his assertion to the contrary is pushing back on my point.
(Strawmanning being where you pretend that your interlocutor said something sillier than they did, or that what they said is tantamount to something silly, so that you can easily knock it down; in this case, he’s insinuating that I made a much bolder claim than I actually did, since that bolder claim is easier to object to than what I actually said.)
I gave Zack the courtesy of explicitly informing him that I was done interacting with him directly; I haven’t actually done that with Said so I’ll do it here:
I find that interacting with Said is overwhelmingly net negative; most of what he seems to me to do is sit back and demand that his conversational partners connect every single dot for him, doing no work himself while he nitpicks with the entitlement of a spoiled princeling. I think his mode of engagement is super unrewarding and makes a supermajority of the threads he participates in worse, by dint of draining away all the energy and recursively proliferating non-cruxy rabbitholes. It has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer. I do not care to spend any more energy whatsoever correcting the misconceptions that he is extremely skilled at producing, ad infinitum, and I shan’t do so any longer; he’s welcome to carry on being however confused or wrong he wants to be about the points I’m making; I don’t find his confusion to be a proxy for any of the audiences whose understanding I care about.
(I will not consider it rude or offensive or culturally incorrect for people to downvote this comment! It’s not necessarily the-kind-of-comment I want to see more of on LW, either, but downvoted or not I feel it’s worth saying once.)
… pretending as if we’re not talking about interactions between me and Zack and Rob (or more broadly, interactions between individuals in the filtered bubble of LessWrong, with the explicit context of arguing about norms within that highly filtered bubble) and acting as if just straightforwardly importing priors and strategies from [the broader internet] or [people in general] is reasonable
But why do you say that I’m pretending this…? I don’t think that I’ve said anything like this—have I?
(Also, of course, I think you somewhat underestimate the degree to which importing priors from the broader internet and/or people in general is reasonable…)
… pretends as if I had claimed that the all-caps sort of hostile response was entirely irrational in such cases, so as to make it seem like his assertion to the contrary is pushing back on my point
Sorry, what? Were you not intending to suggest that such a response is irrational…? That was my understanding of what you wrote. On a reread, I don’t see what other interpretation might be reasonable.
Isn’t it, though?
Probabilistically speaking, I mean. Usually, when people say such things (“you should consider updating your overall language heuristics”, etc.) to you, they are in fact your enemies, and the game-theoretically correct response is disproportionate hostility.
Now, that’s “usually”, and not “always”; and such things are in any case a matter of degree; and there are different classes of “enemies”; and “disproportionate hostility” may have various downsides, dictated by circumstances; and there are other caveats besides.
But, at the very least, you cannot truthfully claim that the all-caps sort of hostile response is entirely irrational in such cases—that it can only be caused by “a trauma-response type overreaction” (or something similar).
There probably exists a word or phrase for the disingenuous maneuver Said is making, here, of pretending as if we’re not talking about interactions between me and Zack and Rob (or more broadly, interactions between individuals in the filtered bubble of LessWrong, with the explicit context of arguing about norms within that highly filtered bubble) and acting as if just straightforwardly importing priors and strategies from [the broader internet] or [people in general] is reasonable.
Probably, but I’m not calling it to mind as easily as I’m calling the word “strawmanning,” which is what’s happening in Said’s last paragraph, where he pretends as if I had claimed that the all-caps sort of hostile response was entirely irrational in such cases, so as to make it seem like his assertion to the contrary is pushing back on my point.
(Strawmanning being where you pretend that your interlocutor said something sillier than they did, or that what they said is tantamount to something silly, so that you can easily knock it down; in this case, he’s insinuating that I made a much bolder claim than I actually did, since that bolder claim is easier to object to than what I actually said.)
I gave Zack the courtesy of explicitly informing him that I was done interacting with him directly; I haven’t actually done that with Said so I’ll do it here:
I find that interacting with Said is overwhelmingly net negative; most of what he seems to me to do is sit back and demand that his conversational partners connect every single dot for him, doing no work himself while he nitpicks with the entitlement of a spoiled princeling. I think his mode of engagement is super unrewarding and makes a supermajority of the threads he participates in worse, by dint of draining away all the energy and recursively proliferating non-cruxy rabbitholes. It has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer. I do not care to spend any more energy whatsoever correcting the misconceptions that he is extremely skilled at producing, ad infinitum, and I shan’t do so any longer; he’s welcome to carry on being however confused or wrong he wants to be about the points I’m making; I don’t find his confusion to be a proxy for any of the audiences whose understanding I care about.
(I will not consider it rude or offensive or culturally incorrect for people to downvote this comment! It’s not necessarily the-kind-of-comment I want to see more of on LW, either, but downvoted or not I feel it’s worth saying once.)
But why do you say that I’m pretending this…? I don’t think that I’ve said anything like this—have I?
(Also, of course, I think you somewhat underestimate the degree to which importing priors from the broader internet and/or people in general is reasonable…)
Sorry, what? Were you not intending to suggest that such a response is irrational…? That was my understanding of what you wrote. On a reread, I don’t see what other interpretation might be reasonable.
If you meant something else—clarify?
Thank you for such a crisp, concise demonstration of exactly the dynamic. Goodbye, Said.