Then apparently Less Wrong readers are more stupid or more ignorant than your previous audience.
This is the type of strawman that frustrates me. I said nothing of the sort.
An equally valid interpretation (and my belief) is that LessWrong readers are much more intolerant of accepting common English phrases and prone to inventing strawmen to the point of making communication at any decent rate of speed nearly impossible. I’m starting to really get the lesson that LessWrong really is conservative to an extreme (this is not a criticism at all).
Your point about altering my writing for the current target audience is dead on the money. In general, your post was as adversarial as my writing is interpreted as being. There’s a definite double standard here (but since I’m here as a guest, I shouldn’t complain).
LW readers are, perhaps, more cautious than average about “accepting common English phrases” because a major topic in rationality is precisely the fact that such common phrases often conceal fatal vagueness. Whether or not I agree with you that you’ve been using certain words and phrases to mean exactly what an ordinary English speaker would understand them to mean, this kind of caution surrounding ordinary language is generally considered to be a feature, not a bug, of discourse around here.
As far as the double standard thing, it seems like the one hypothesis you can’t bring yourself to entertain is that nobody can figure out what you’re talking about, despite some fairly sympathetic attempts to do so. After a few times around, everyone will have lost patience with you, yes. But that’s not a double standard. (I say this as emphatically an outsider: I don’t comment here much and no one at LW knows me from Adam.)
(Sorry in advance that I won’t be able to reply to any comments for at least 24 hours, since I’m traveling—musicology conference this week!)
This is the type of strawman that frustrates me. I said nothing of the sort.
An equally valid interpretation (and my belief) is that LessWrong readers are much more intolerant of accepting common English phrases and prone to inventing strawmen to the point of making communication at any decent rate of speed nearly impossible. I’m starting to really get the lesson that LessWrong really is conservative to an extreme (this is not a criticism at all).
Your point about altering my writing for the current target audience is dead on the money. In general, your post was as adversarial as my writing is interpreted as being. There’s a definite double standard here (but since I’m here as a guest, I shouldn’t complain).
LW readers are, perhaps, more cautious than average about “accepting common English phrases” because a major topic in rationality is precisely the fact that such common phrases often conceal fatal vagueness. Whether or not I agree with you that you’ve been using certain words and phrases to mean exactly what an ordinary English speaker would understand them to mean, this kind of caution surrounding ordinary language is generally considered to be a feature, not a bug, of discourse around here.
As far as the double standard thing, it seems like the one hypothesis you can’t bring yourself to entertain is that nobody can figure out what you’re talking about, despite some fairly sympathetic attempts to do so. After a few times around, everyone will have lost patience with you, yes. But that’s not a double standard. (I say this as emphatically an outsider: I don’t comment here much and no one at LW knows me from Adam.)
(Sorry in advance that I won’t be able to reply to any comments for at least 24 hours, since I’m traveling—musicology conference this week!)