I do find myself somewhat confused about the hostility in this comment. It’s hard to write good things, and there will always be misunderstandings. Many posts on LessWrong are unnecessarily confusing, including many posts by Eliezer, usually just because it takes a lot of effort, time and skill to polish a post to the point where it’s completely clear to everyone on the site (and in many technical subjects achieving that bar is often impossible).
Recommendations for how to phrase things in a clear way seem good to me, and I appreciate them on my writing, but doing so in a way that implies some kind of major moral failing seems like it makes people overall less likely to post, and also overall less likely to react positively to feedback.
You seem to pose a model where a post is either saying good things or saying things uncleanly in a way that’s easily misunderstood. A model whereby it’s not important to analyses which claims happen to be made which are wrong.
My first answer was pointing out statements in the post that I consider to be clearly wrong and important (it’s something many people believed that holds back intellectual progress in the topic). The response seemed to be along the lines of:
“I didn’t mean to imply that what I claimed to be true (” Similarly, the primary thing when you take a word in your lips is your intention to reflect the territory, whatever the means”), I said that because it seems to send the right tribal signals because it looks similar to what EY wrote.
Besides the people in my tribe that I showed my draft liked it.”
Defending the post as being tribally right instead of either allowing claims to be falsified or defending the claims on their merits feels to me like a violation of debate norms that raises emotional hostility.
I feel that it’s bad to by default assume that any disagreement is due to misunderstandings and not substance.
I do think that emotion is justified in the sense that if we get a lot of articles that are full of tribal signaling and attempts to look like EY posts but endorse misconceptions, that would be problematic to LW in a way that posts that are simply low quality because writing good is hard wouldn’t be (and that wouldn’t trigger emotions).
After rereading the post a few times, I think you are just misunderstanding it?
Like, I can’t make sense of your top-level comment in my current interpretation of the post, and as such I interpreted your comment as asking for clarification in a weirdly hostile tone (which was supported by your first sentence being “What is that sentence supposed to tell me?”). I generally think it’s a bad idea to start substantive criticisms of a post with a rhetorical question that’s hard to distinguish from a genuine question (and probably would advise against rhetorical questions in general, but am less confident of that).
To me the section you quoted seems relatively clear, and makes a pretty straightforwardly true point, and from my current vantage point I fail to understand your criticism of it. I would be happy to try to explain my current interpretation, but would need a bit more help understanding what your current perspective is.
I have written multiple post in this thread and I wouldn’t expect you to make sense of the tone by treating this post in isolation.
In a way it’s true straightforwardly true point to say that apples are significantly different from tomatoes. It’s defensibly true in a certain sense.
At the same time if a reader wants to learn something from the statement and transfer the knowledge to another case, they need to model of what kind of significant difference is implied.
You might read the statement as being about how tomatoes are vegetables purposes for tariff or for cooking purposes and how scientific taxonomy isn’t the only taxonomy that matters but it’s very bailey-and-motte about that issue. The bailey-and-motteness then makes it hard to falsify the claims.
Are you saying people should never casually make such claims about apples and tomatoes? I haven’t tried to parse your comments in detail, apologies if I’m misunderstanding. But they seem to be implying a huge amount of friction on conversation that does not seem practical to me. (i.e. only discuss things if you’re going to take the time to clarify details of your model. The reasons we have clusters and words and shorthand is because that’s a lot of effort that most of the time isn’t worth it)
A model should generally be clear enough to be falsifiable. It might be okay for a paragraph to not expand an idea in enough detail for that but when there’s a >3800 word essay about a model that avoids being falsifiable and instead is full with applause lights I do consider that bad.
I do find myself somewhat confused about the hostility in this comment. It’s hard to write good things, and there will always be misunderstandings. Many posts on LessWrong are unnecessarily confusing, including many posts by Eliezer, usually just because it takes a lot of effort, time and skill to polish a post to the point where it’s completely clear to everyone on the site (and in many technical subjects achieving that bar is often impossible).
Recommendations for how to phrase things in a clear way seem good to me, and I appreciate them on my writing, but doing so in a way that implies some kind of major moral failing seems like it makes people overall less likely to post, and also overall less likely to react positively to feedback.
You seem to pose a model where a post is either saying good things or saying things uncleanly in a way that’s easily misunderstood. A model whereby it’s not important to analyses which claims happen to be made which are wrong.
My first answer was pointing out statements in the post that I consider to be clearly wrong and important (it’s something many people believed that holds back intellectual progress in the topic). The response seemed to be along the lines of:
“I didn’t mean to imply that what I claimed to be true (” Similarly, the primary thing when you take a word in your lips is your intention to reflect the territory, whatever the means”), I said that because it seems to send the right tribal signals because it looks similar to what EY wrote.
Besides the people in my tribe that I showed my draft liked it.”
Defending the post as being tribally right instead of either allowing claims to be falsified or defending the claims on their merits feels to me like a violation of debate norms that raises emotional hostility.
I feel that it’s bad to by default assume that any disagreement is due to misunderstandings and not substance.
I do think that emotion is justified in the sense that if we get a lot of articles that are full of tribal signaling and attempts to look like EY posts but endorse misconceptions, that would be problematic to LW in a way that posts that are simply low quality because writing good is hard wouldn’t be (and that wouldn’t trigger emotions).
After rereading the post a few times, I think you are just misunderstanding it?
Like, I can’t make sense of your top-level comment in my current interpretation of the post, and as such I interpreted your comment as asking for clarification in a weirdly hostile tone (which was supported by your first sentence being “What is that sentence supposed to tell me?”). I generally think it’s a bad idea to start substantive criticisms of a post with a rhetorical question that’s hard to distinguish from a genuine question (and probably would advise against rhetorical questions in general, but am less confident of that).
To me the section you quoted seems relatively clear, and makes a pretty straightforwardly true point, and from my current vantage point I fail to understand your criticism of it. I would be happy to try to explain my current interpretation, but would need a bit more help understanding what your current perspective is.
I have written multiple post in this thread and I wouldn’t expect you to make sense of the tone by treating this post in isolation.
In a way it’s true straightforwardly true point to say that apples are significantly different from tomatoes. It’s defensibly true in a certain sense.
At the same time if a reader wants to learn something from the statement and transfer the knowledge to another case, they need to model of what kind of significant difference is implied.
You might read the statement as being about how tomatoes are vegetables purposes for tariff or for cooking purposes and how scientific taxonomy isn’t the only taxonomy that matters but it’s very bailey-and-motte about that issue. The bailey-and-motteness then makes it hard to falsify the claims.
Are you saying people should never casually make such claims about apples and tomatoes? I haven’t tried to parse your comments in detail, apologies if I’m misunderstanding. But they seem to be implying a huge amount of friction on conversation that does not seem practical to me. (i.e. only discuss things if you’re going to take the time to clarify details of your model. The reasons we have clusters and words and shorthand is because that’s a lot of effort that most of the time isn’t worth it)
A model should generally be clear enough to be falsifiable. It might be okay for a paragraph to not expand an idea in enough detail for that but when there’s a >3800 word essay about a model that avoids being falsifiable and instead is full with applause lights I do consider that bad.