Re outside community members: yeah, that all seems like decent circumstantial evidence. (I had seen the users, not seen the link in the tweet, and not thought hard about the vote count.)
On the other hand, the tweet itself doesn’t have that much engagement, and the link to LW is behind another click—if you showed me that tweet and asked me to predict how many people would sign up to LW because of it, I would guess fewer than 5. I’d also say, I think a lot of people will upvote things on the basis of “this shouldn’t be so negative”, even when they wouldn’t upvote it from neutral.
I don’t feel like litigating this, because I’m not sure we disagree too much on “how likely is it that this happened”. Like, probably I think it’s less likely than you do, but I think our real disagreement is that according to me, you should have flagged it as inference.
Maybe you already noticed all this and don’t think it indicates the comment was vote brigaded. If that’s the case I don’t know what evidence would convince you otherwise.
Well, if Ruby or another mod looked at the vote patterns and told us that happened, I’d believe it. It’s possible that they treat vote counts as too private to want to do that. If I saw people admitting to coordinating to vote brigade the comment, I’d probably believe it. That seems unlikely.
But it might be the case that something is true, and also we’ll never get the kind of evidence that brings us from “this is our confident inference” to “we can just flatly assert this”.
You’re literally asking me to mind read here. And I responded with my most likely explanation for what I think was going on in his head and then you chide me for giving you an inference based on circumstantial evidence.
No, I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference. Recall: “It’s not necessarily bad to simply assert such things … But I would have preferred if you made it clearer that you were doing it and knew you were doing it.”
Ruby noticed the downvotes, said he cared about them, and has not banned other comments that are content-wise very similar but have less downvotes.
What comments are you thinking of, specifically? I don’t recall seeing any others that I’d have said were similar in content.
Blueiris provides the examples and justifications. You may not like the examples and justifications, you may think they fall flat, etc., but blueiris does provide them
I guess I’m not sure what examples and justifications you’re thinking of? The two links above came after they’d been banned and asked not to comment further, and there seems very little else? And yeah, I’m not really impressed by bad examples and failed justifications.
Yet Ruby makes the very same kind of accusations against blueiris and provides no better examples than did blueiris.
Does not ring true to me.
Not a ridiculous strawman because it’s accurate.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
Moderators allow reliance on negative intuition for a plethora of other things, but apparently not for porn.
I repeat: “that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance” is important here.
You’re asking for high levels of effort from your counterparty while not putting in much yourself.
Again: inference! You don’t know how much effort I put in but you flatly assert that I didn’t put in much. And you’re not being precise enough to be falsifiable; do you think I put in 20 minutes and should have put in an hour, or do you think I put in an hour and should have put in three, or what?
But also, I actually don’t think I’m asking for that much effort from you. I don’t think it takes much effort to add words like “presumably”, “I think”, “it seems to me”, and then I would not have made the first bit of my comment. And that’s the only bit of my comment that feels to me like asking you to put extra effort in.
You’re saying there’s a lot of surface-level badness going on with my comments but not actually providing any interpretation or explanation of the situation yourself that disagrees.
I think a lot of the badness in your comments isn’t particularly related to the situation, so that seems fine to me.
You say my explanation of the Ialdaboath thing[1] and how strongly the moderators connected his offline behavior to his lw postings “doesn’t ring true to me.” But you don’t provide any differing interpretation.
Yeah, it would have been better if I gave an alternate description of how I saw things, but… I dunno, maybe not that much better? Like, if you say “the Hobbit is a book about eagles” I can say “no, the Hobbit is about...”—but the Hobbit can be about multiple things—even if I’m right, that doesn’t make you wrong. So really I might just as well say “no, that’s not what it’s about”, and then either we find some way for one of us to convince the other or we drop it.
Better yet might be for me to take your explanation of why you think the Hobbit is about eagles and say what seems off about it to me. Which might mean taking some bits and saying “no, this is wrong and this other thing would have been right”, and taking other bits and just saying “this is wrong”. (If you describe a scene that doesn’t exist in the book, what more can I say than “that scene doesn’t exist in the book”?)
But indeed I didn’t do any of this, because (despite what you may have thought) I’d already put in substantial effort and didn’t want to put in more. I did provide a link to where readers could at least check, and see whether they thought the thing you said rang true to them.
But okay, sure, to give a brief try: you say “he was banned for X and no one decided to justify or explain why X was relevant”. It seems to me that Vaniver gave a lengthy explanation of why he was banned, and it was not “for X” though X played into the decision in ways that I really don’t feel like trying to summarize. And when you say “he was banned for X” this seems like yet another assertion about people’s internal states, this time contradicted by the things they said. (Which doesn’t mean the assertion is wrong, to be clear, but I think you should flag the contradiction as well as the “I am asserting things I cannot observe”.) And then “no one decided to justify or explain” seems weird given how many words were written on the subject… like, it sounds like “this is just a thing that happened and people kept quiet about it”, where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons? I dunno, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true.
I don’t have the conversational norm of rote performance of using weasel words. If I think X is true with high probability based on circumstantial evidence I’m probably just going to say “X”. I don’t think tacking on “I think” to the front of that adds much content. Anybody’s free to disagree with me as much as they want and that has nothing to do with whether I say “I think” or “it seems to me.” Everything is an inference.
But also, I actually don’t think I’m asking for that much effort from you. I don’t think it takes much effort to add words like “presumably”, “I think”, “it seems to me”, and then I would not have made the first bit of my comment. And that’s the only bit of my comment that feels to me like asking you to put extra effort in.
So it’s not that it’s a bunch of extra effort to just add your chosen phrases to my comments. It’s that it’s extra effort to change my writing style based on your stated communicative preference. I might do that for some people in some cases, but not for you or most any other lw poster in an online forum.
What irks me though is that you don’t follow the communicative rules you’re asking me to follow. And that’s why your comments are disturbing. You’re asking me to hamstring my rhetorical ability using these practices that you yourself don’t even follow.
I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true
where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons?
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
Where is your hedging? Where is your “I think” or “Probably”. These are as assertive as any of my comments. And they’re all inferences. Of course your comments elsewhere and the couple posts of yours that I’ve read before all have assertive statements about things that can only be inferences. That’s how people communicate and the posts don’t suffer for it. Most people have the ability to read “X” and understand that well of course the person saying “X” doesn’t mean they’ve personally observed X and believe it with 99.9999% probability. They mean they think X is true.
This is a common, dark, rhetorical trick. You’re asking me to hamstring my ability to communicate while taking full advantage of the communicative tools at your disposal. So when I see a comment where, “I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference” I have absolutely no desire to acquiesce to the restrictive conversational rules being asked of me.
If I think X is true with high probability based on circumstantial evidence I’m probably just going to say “X”.
Well, how high? Because by my count you’ve been wrong at least once in this thread when doing this (when you accused me of not putting in much effort). If say 1⁄10 of things you flatly assert are false, that’s not very impressive.
So it’s not that it’s a bunch of extra effort to just add your chosen phrases to my comments. It’s that it’s extra effort to change my writing style based on your stated communicative preference.
Yeah, this is fair.
Like, I think your communication style is a bad fit for LW, but that doesn’t mean changing it is easy for you.
using these practices that you yourself don’t even follow.
None of your examples show me failing to live up to the standards I was asking of you. It’s possible I miscommunicated those standards, and it’s possible (even probable) I fail to live up to them in other places. But in these specific cases, I did not fail.
I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true
This is a claim about my own state of mind. I don’t need to hedge it, because in this case I’m confident about my observations of my own state of mind.
where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons?
The hedging here comes from the question mark and the following words, “I dunno, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is”.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
This is observation, not inference.
(Moreover, it’s observation based on shared data. Anyone can read the thread and verify its truth or falsehood for themselves, and anyone can know they can do that based on the context.)
(I mean, sure, it’s inference in the sense that, like… photons hit my retinas and I interpret them as words written in the English language and so on. But it seems to me that there’s a real, important difference between this kind of inference and the kind of inference I’ve been criticizing. I don’t know if I can pinpoint it, and I don’t feel like trying right now. Might be worth trying at some point in future. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already something in the sequences about it. FWIW my sense is that there’s some combination of “how confident are you” and “where does your confidence come from” and probably also “how relevant is it” that weighs into the question. And, like, yeah it’s not great that I’m trying to enforce standards I can’t really articulate, but… I don’t think that sinks the whole idea.)
Of course your comments elsewhere and the couple posts of yours that I’ve read before all have assertive statements about things that can only be inferences.
I confess I’m not very curious about these, given the prior examples.
Most people have the ability to read “X” and understand that well of course the person saying “X” doesn’t mean they’ve personally observed X and believe it with 99.9999% probability. They mean they think X is true.
I think most people are going to distinguish between “Sweden’s national currency is the Korona” (which I would not say given my current state of knowledge) and “Sweden’s national currency is… the Korona, I think?” (which I would).
Both of them might literally mean that I think Sweden’s national currency is the Korona, but I expect most people will think I’m quite confident in the first case and not very confident in the second.
Anyway, I’m out. Mostly? I, uh, assign at least 10% probability that if you comment further, you’ll make confident false claims about me. (You’ve already done that in more than 10% of your comments on this thread.) I dislike when that happens. So like, I want to leave open the possibility that if you do that I might jump in to say “no”, and I guess I want to leave open that possibility for other things you might say too… but I’m at least going to try hard not to put effort into replying to you again. (But if you do say things and I don’t reply, that is not an endorsement.) This might be a mistake, maybe I should just cut it out entirely, but let’s give it a go.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
This is observation, not inference.
(I mean, sure, it’s inference in the sense that, like… photons hit my retinas and I interpret them as words written in the English language and so on. But it seems to me that there’s a real, important difference between this kind of inference and the kind of inference I’ve been criticizing.
You don’t understand what an inference is and your strawman reasoning of why this comment is inference wouldn’t fool anybody. “nothing even remotely like” is a subjective determination. It’s comparing two things and judging how similar you think they are. I think it’ similar to what he said. You think it’s dissimilar. But I’m fine with you saying it with as much assertiveness as you do because again, I don’t have your rule about inferences and hedging words.
We have disagreements about how assertive your comments are, you think they aren’t that assertive, or if they’re assertive they’re non-inferences, and assume they naturally fit into your stated communicative standards. I’ve demonstrated how that’s not true. A regular person might think, ok then if people can have reasonable disagreements as to how something can be interpreted as an inference. maybe I shouldn’t be telling others to use these weird communicative protocols that entirely rely on my own subjective classification of things as inference or not. You don’t do that. You write with more misplaced confidence than I have ever done in this thread. I’m not going to keep responding if you’re going to make incredibly poor strawmans of what I’m saying and fail to realize your own communicative failures.
Re outside community members: yeah, that all seems like decent circumstantial evidence. (I had seen the users, not seen the link in the tweet, and not thought hard about the vote count.)
On the other hand, the tweet itself doesn’t have that much engagement, and the link to LW is behind another click—if you showed me that tweet and asked me to predict how many people would sign up to LW because of it, I would guess fewer than 5. I’d also say, I think a lot of people will upvote things on the basis of “this shouldn’t be so negative”, even when they wouldn’t upvote it from neutral.
I don’t feel like litigating this, because I’m not sure we disagree too much on “how likely is it that this happened”. Like, probably I think it’s less likely than you do, but I think our real disagreement is that according to me, you should have flagged it as inference.
Well, if Ruby or another mod looked at the vote patterns and told us that happened, I’d believe it. It’s possible that they treat vote counts as too private to want to do that. If I saw people admitting to coordinating to vote brigade the comment, I’d probably believe it. That seems unlikely.
But it might be the case that something is true, and also we’ll never get the kind of evidence that brings us from “this is our confident inference” to “we can just flatly assert this”.
No, I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference. Recall: “It’s not necessarily bad to simply assert such things … But I would have preferred if you made it clearer that you were doing it and knew you were doing it.”
What comments are you thinking of, specifically? I don’t recall seeing any others that I’d have said were similar in content.
I guess I’m not sure what examples and justifications you’re thinking of? The two links above came after they’d been banned and asked not to comment further, and there seems very little else? And yeah, I’m not really impressed by bad examples and failed justifications.
Does not ring true to me.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
I repeat: “that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance” is important here.
Again: inference! You don’t know how much effort I put in but you flatly assert that I didn’t put in much. And you’re not being precise enough to be falsifiable; do you think I put in 20 minutes and should have put in an hour, or do you think I put in an hour and should have put in three, or what?
But also, I actually don’t think I’m asking for that much effort from you. I don’t think it takes much effort to add words like “presumably”, “I think”, “it seems to me”, and then I would not have made the first bit of my comment. And that’s the only bit of my comment that feels to me like asking you to put extra effort in.
I think a lot of the badness in your comments isn’t particularly related to the situation, so that seems fine to me.
Yeah, it would have been better if I gave an alternate description of how I saw things, but… I dunno, maybe not that much better? Like, if you say “the Hobbit is a book about eagles” I can say “no, the Hobbit is about...”—but the Hobbit can be about multiple things—even if I’m right, that doesn’t make you wrong. So really I might just as well say “no, that’s not what it’s about”, and then either we find some way for one of us to convince the other or we drop it.
Better yet might be for me to take your explanation of why you think the Hobbit is about eagles and say what seems off about it to me. Which might mean taking some bits and saying “no, this is wrong and this other thing would have been right”, and taking other bits and just saying “this is wrong”. (If you describe a scene that doesn’t exist in the book, what more can I say than “that scene doesn’t exist in the book”?)
But indeed I didn’t do any of this, because (despite what you may have thought) I’d already put in substantial effort and didn’t want to put in more. I did provide a link to where readers could at least check, and see whether they thought the thing you said rang true to them.
But okay, sure, to give a brief try: you say “he was banned for X and no one decided to justify or explain why X was relevant”. It seems to me that Vaniver gave a lengthy explanation of why he was banned, and it was not “for X” though X played into the decision in ways that I really don’t feel like trying to summarize. And when you say “he was banned for X” this seems like yet another assertion about people’s internal states, this time contradicted by the things they said. (Which doesn’t mean the assertion is wrong, to be clear, but I think you should flag the contradiction as well as the “I am asserting things I cannot observe”.) And then “no one decided to justify or explain” seems weird given how many words were written on the subject… like, it sounds like “this is just a thing that happened and people kept quiet about it”, where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons? I dunno, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true.
I don’t have the conversational norm of rote performance of using weasel words. If I think X is true with high probability based on circumstantial evidence I’m probably just going to say “X”. I don’t think tacking on “I think” to the front of that adds much content. Anybody’s free to disagree with me as much as they want and that has nothing to do with whether I say “I think” or “it seems to me.” Everything is an inference.
So it’s not that it’s a bunch of extra effort to just add your chosen phrases to my comments. It’s that it’s extra effort to change my writing style based on your stated communicative preference. I might do that for some people in some cases, but not for you or most any other lw poster in an online forum.
What irks me though is that you don’t follow the communicative rules you’re asking me to follow. And that’s why your comments are disturbing. You’re asking me to hamstring my rhetorical ability using these practices that you yourself don’t even follow.
Where is your hedging? Where is your “I think” or “Probably”. These are as assertive as any of my comments. And they’re all inferences. Of course your comments elsewhere and the couple posts of yours that I’ve read before all have assertive statements about things that can only be inferences. That’s how people communicate and the posts don’t suffer for it. Most people have the ability to read “X” and understand that well of course the person saying “X” doesn’t mean they’ve personally observed X and believe it with 99.9999% probability. They mean they think X is true.
This is a common, dark, rhetorical trick. You’re asking me to hamstring my ability to communicate while taking full advantage of the communicative tools at your disposal. So when I see a comment where, “I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference” I have absolutely no desire to acquiesce to the restrictive conversational rules being asked of me.
Well, how high? Because by my count you’ve been wrong at least once in this thread when doing this (when you accused me of not putting in much effort). If say 1⁄10 of things you flatly assert are false, that’s not very impressive.
Yeah, this is fair.
Like, I think your communication style is a bad fit for LW, but that doesn’t mean changing it is easy for you.
None of your examples show me failing to live up to the standards I was asking of you. It’s possible I miscommunicated those standards, and it’s possible (even probable) I fail to live up to them in other places. But in these specific cases, I did not fail.
This is a claim about my own state of mind. I don’t need to hedge it, because in this case I’m confident about my observations of my own state of mind.
The hedging here comes from the question mark and the following words, “I dunno, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is”.
This is observation, not inference.
(Moreover, it’s observation based on shared data. Anyone can read the thread and verify its truth or falsehood for themselves, and anyone can know they can do that based on the context.)
(I mean, sure, it’s inference in the sense that, like… photons hit my retinas and I interpret them as words written in the English language and so on. But it seems to me that there’s a real, important difference between this kind of inference and the kind of inference I’ve been criticizing. I don’t know if I can pinpoint it, and I don’t feel like trying right now. Might be worth trying at some point in future. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already something in the sequences about it. FWIW my sense is that there’s some combination of “how confident are you” and “where does your confidence come from” and probably also “how relevant is it” that weighs into the question. And, like, yeah it’s not great that I’m trying to enforce standards I can’t really articulate, but… I don’t think that sinks the whole idea.)
I confess I’m not very curious about these, given the prior examples.
I think most people are going to distinguish between “Sweden’s national currency is the Korona” (which I would not say given my current state of knowledge) and “Sweden’s national currency is… the Korona, I think?” (which I would).
Both of them might literally mean that I think Sweden’s national currency is the Korona, but I expect most people will think I’m quite confident in the first case and not very confident in the second.
Anyway, I’m out. Mostly? I, uh, assign at least 10% probability that if you comment further, you’ll make confident false claims about me. (You’ve already done that in more than 10% of your comments on this thread.) I dislike when that happens. So like, I want to leave open the possibility that if you do that I might jump in to say “no”, and I guess I want to leave open that possibility for other things you might say too… but I’m at least going to try hard not to put effort into replying to you again. (But if you do say things and I don’t reply, that is not an endorsement.) This might be a mistake, maybe I should just cut it out entirely, but let’s give it a go.
You don’t understand what an inference is and your strawman reasoning of why this comment is inference wouldn’t fool anybody. “nothing even remotely like” is a subjective determination. It’s comparing two things and judging how similar you think they are. I think it’ similar to what he said. You think it’s dissimilar. But I’m fine with you saying it with as much assertiveness as you do because again, I don’t have your rule about inferences and hedging words.
We have disagreements about how assertive your comments are, you think they aren’t that assertive, or if they’re assertive they’re non-inferences, and assume they naturally fit into your stated communicative standards. I’ve demonstrated how that’s not true. A regular person might think, ok then if people can have reasonable disagreements as to how something can be interpreted as an inference. maybe I shouldn’t be telling others to use these weird communicative protocols that entirely rely on my own subjective classification of things as inference or not. You don’t do that. You write with more misplaced confidence than I have ever done in this thread. I’m not going to keep responding if you’re going to make incredibly poor strawmans of what I’m saying and fail to realize your own communicative failures.