Your descriptions of what I said in the comments on “The New Scientific Method” are not accurate. They are like your purported quotations from Katie Bouman’s talk (though at least you didn’t put them in quotation marks this time): in condensing what I actually said into a brief and quotable form, you have apparently attempted to make it sound as silly as possible rather than summarizing as accurately as possible. I think you shouldn’t do that.
(My description in terms of “weirdness” was meant to help to clarify what is going on in an algorithm that you criticized but apparently hadn’t understood well. It turns out that it was a mistake to try to be as clear and helpful as possible, rather than writing defensively so as to make it as difficult as possible for someone malicious to pick things that sound silly.)
I already told you (in comments on that other post) what motivates me: bad science, and especially proselytizing bad science, makes me sad. It makes me especially sad when it happens on Less Wrong, which aims to be a home for good clear thinking. Having seen the previous iteration of Less Wrong badly harmed by political cranks who exploited the (very praiseworthy) local culture of taking ideas seriously even when they are nonstandard or appear bad at a first glance, I am not keen to leave uncriticized a post that is confidently wrong about so many things.
I don’t know what anyone else may have done, but I at least have not downvoted all your comments and posts. I have downvoted some specific things that seem to me badly wrong; that’s what downvoting is meant for. (As it happens, it looks to me as if you have downvoted all my comments on your posts.)
Your descriptions of what I said in the comments on “The New Scientific Method” are not accurate. They are like your purported quotations from Katie Bouman’s talk (though at least you didn’t put them in quotation marks this time): in condensing what I actually said into a brief and quotable form, you have apparently attempted to make it sound as silly as possible rather than summarizing as accurately as possible. I think you shouldn’t do that.
(My description in terms of “weirdness” was meant to help to clarify what is going on in an algorithm that you criticized but apparently hadn’t understood well. It turns out that it was a mistake to try to be as clear and helpful as possible, rather than writing defensively so as to make it as difficult as possible for someone malicious to pick things that sound silly.)
I already told you (in comments on that other post) what motivates me: bad science, and especially proselytizing bad science, makes me sad. It makes me especially sad when it happens on Less Wrong, which aims to be a home for good clear thinking. Having seen the previous iteration of Less Wrong badly harmed by political cranks who exploited the (very praiseworthy) local culture of taking ideas seriously even when they are nonstandard or appear bad at a first glance, I am not keen to leave uncriticized a post that is confidently wrong about so many things.
I don’t know what anyone else may have done, but I at least have not downvoted all your comments and posts. I have downvoted some specific things that seem to me badly wrong; that’s what downvoting is meant for. (As it happens, it looks to me as if you have downvoted all my comments on your posts.)