You more-or-less said, “gwern is imperfect but net-positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.”. I think such a response, in reply to someone who feels bullied by a senior members and worries the community is/will close ranks, is not the best course of action, and in fact is better off not being made. Even assuming your comment was not a deontological imperative, but rather a shorthand for a heuristic argument, I am very uncertain as to what heuristic you are suggesting and why you think it’s a good heuristic.
Even if you ignored all that and rewrote your original comment differently, that might be sufficient to make headway.
Does that make things clearer? If this line of inquiry also seems too unweildy to begin replying to, can you go up meta levels and suggest a way to proceed?
gwern is not a “senior member”. He is not a moderator, as far as I know, though he did do some work for MIRI. He is a very prominent regular with superb research and analysis skills, quick wit, sharp tongue and occasionally bad attitude, apparently uninterested in applying the principle of charity. He’s been told as much and was unwilling to acknowledge this as a problem.
Like on any forum, you don’t have to engage everyone who replies to you. I ignore comments from a few regulars, some very active here, whom I have engaged in the past in repeated unproductive exchanges until I learned better. ThisSpaceAvailable should do likewise. This is basic internet hygiene. As long as the person you are unhappy to talk to does not run the place actively hounding you from thread to thread, downvoting and sniping, ignore them. If you feel that they break the forum rules, raise the issue with the mods. What ThisSpaceAvailable wrote comes across as drama-queening (an uncharitable term, but it fits in this case, hence all the downvotes of the OP). The very first sentence is an extreme put-off. Just now I have looked through the linked thread and my impression is that it’s the OP who lost his cool. Anyway, I agree that my original reply could have been written in a more charitable way, but the point (a “heuristic”, if you like) still stands: ignore those you don’t like, unless they clearly break forum rules, or don’t complain (or don’t participate). It’s not a “deontological imperative”, more like common sense in online discourse.
You more-or-less said, “gwern is imperfect but net-positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.”. I think such a response, in reply to someone who feels bullied by a senior members and worries the community is/will close ranks, is not the best course of action, and in fact is better off not being made. Even assuming your comment was not a deontological imperative, but rather a shorthand for a heuristic argument, I am very uncertain as to what heuristic you are suggesting and why you think it’s a good heuristic.
Even if you ignored all that and rewrote your original comment differently, that might be sufficient to make headway.
Does that make things clearer? If this line of inquiry also seems too unweildy to begin replying to, can you go up meta levels and suggest a way to proceed?
I’ll try one more time...
gwern is not a “senior member”. He is not a moderator, as far as I know, though he did do some work for MIRI. He is a very prominent regular with superb research and analysis skills, quick wit, sharp tongue and occasionally bad attitude, apparently uninterested in applying the principle of charity. He’s been told as much and was unwilling to acknowledge this as a problem.
Like on any forum, you don’t have to engage everyone who replies to you. I ignore comments from a few regulars, some very active here, whom I have engaged in the past in repeated unproductive exchanges until I learned better. ThisSpaceAvailable should do likewise. This is basic internet hygiene. As long as the person you are unhappy to talk to does not run the place actively hounding you from thread to thread, downvoting and sniping, ignore them. If you feel that they break the forum rules, raise the issue with the mods. What ThisSpaceAvailable wrote comes across as drama-queening (an uncharitable term, but it fits in this case, hence all the downvotes of the OP). The very first sentence is an extreme put-off. Just now I have looked through the linked thread and my impression is that it’s the OP who lost his cool. Anyway, I agree that my original reply could have been written in a more charitable way, but the point (a “heuristic”, if you like) still stands: ignore those you don’t like, unless they clearly break forum rules, or don’t complain (or don’t participate). It’s not a “deontological imperative”, more like common sense in online discourse.