I agree that I was attacking a strawman. That is why I asked you to clarify your argument.
To answer your question about whether you are meeting the posting standards, I believe that the answer is yes; in particular, your arguments are written clearly, so that it is easy to understand what you are saying, even if I think it is wrong. Think of downvotes as a learning opportunity (these other people think I’m clearly wrong, I should try to understand why). I’m not sure if this is a particularly good metric, though, since I have been heavily downvoted in the past on issues where I am still completely convinced that I am correct.
In this instance I will try to explain what SimonF and I found objectionable about your original post. Essentially, you used extremely broad words (“good”, “bad”, “research”) to describe your stance, in such a way that your claim was obviously false without adding additional qualifiers. I believe that you agree with this, since you said that I was attacking a strawman.
The problem is that you did not provide the necessary qualifiers to clarify what you meant. It was probably obvious to you what you meant (you were quick to clarify when asked), but it was not obvious to me. From your perspective it probably feels like I was just trying to be difficult, but I promise, I actually did not know what your intended argument was, and was honestly trying to determine it.
This problem leads to two separate issues—first, it slows down the speed of discourse, and can lead to confusion if instead of asking for clarification people add their own (incorrect) qualifiers to your argument. Second, vague statements tend to convey insufficiently many bits of information to back up most claims, so they are a bad way of trying to support a conclusion.
I apologize if that was long-winded, but hopefully someone will find it helpful.
I appreciate your post, and I think you’ve been very hospitable, and I appreciate that as well. While I do have the habit of writing concisely, and believe in writing that way, I also have to admit that my original post was shorter because I was uncertain on how I would be received. By the way, I didn’t think that in your post you were being dishonest, in fact rather the opposite. You realized that there was probably some miscommunication and wanted to resolve it, and that’s exactly how dialogue should proceed. I felt that my post was interpreted more simply than I had intended because SimonF thought that my argument was obviously wrong. While it may be unsound, I didn’t think it was trivially unsound. I guess “strawman” is often an accusation of dishonesty, I just didn’t know what better term to use for “a more simple version of my argument is being counterargued than the argument I wanted to present”.
But I also want to thank you, again, for being hospitable and welcoming to your community. I’m still uncertain how this will go, I mainly joined because I want to learn more about induction, which is something that I shouldn’t have ignored before. I also read through many of the posts in the sequences, and this site comes closest to the “ideal” I’ve had before about my own life, and what I understand to be intellectual virtue.
I agree that I was attacking a strawman. That is why I asked you to clarify your argument.
To answer your question about whether you are meeting the posting standards, I believe that the answer is yes; in particular, your arguments are written clearly, so that it is easy to understand what you are saying, even if I think it is wrong. Think of downvotes as a learning opportunity (these other people think I’m clearly wrong, I should try to understand why). I’m not sure if this is a particularly good metric, though, since I have been heavily downvoted in the past on issues where I am still completely convinced that I am correct.
In this instance I will try to explain what SimonF and I found objectionable about your original post. Essentially, you used extremely broad words (“good”, “bad”, “research”) to describe your stance, in such a way that your claim was obviously false without adding additional qualifiers. I believe that you agree with this, since you said that I was attacking a strawman.
The problem is that you did not provide the necessary qualifiers to clarify what you meant. It was probably obvious to you what you meant (you were quick to clarify when asked), but it was not obvious to me. From your perspective it probably feels like I was just trying to be difficult, but I promise, I actually did not know what your intended argument was, and was honestly trying to determine it.
This problem leads to two separate issues—first, it slows down the speed of discourse, and can lead to confusion if instead of asking for clarification people add their own (incorrect) qualifiers to your argument. Second, vague statements tend to convey insufficiently many bits of information to back up most claims, so they are a bad way of trying to support a conclusion.
I apologize if that was long-winded, but hopefully someone will find it helpful.
I appreciate your post, and I think you’ve been very hospitable, and I appreciate that as well. While I do have the habit of writing concisely, and believe in writing that way, I also have to admit that my original post was shorter because I was uncertain on how I would be received. By the way, I didn’t think that in your post you were being dishonest, in fact rather the opposite. You realized that there was probably some miscommunication and wanted to resolve it, and that’s exactly how dialogue should proceed. I felt that my post was interpreted more simply than I had intended because SimonF thought that my argument was obviously wrong. While it may be unsound, I didn’t think it was trivially unsound. I guess “strawman” is often an accusation of dishonesty, I just didn’t know what better term to use for “a more simple version of my argument is being counterargued than the argument I wanted to present”.
But I also want to thank you, again, for being hospitable and welcoming to your community. I’m still uncertain how this will go, I mainly joined because I want to learn more about induction, which is something that I shouldn’t have ignored before. I also read through many of the posts in the sequences, and this site comes closest to the “ideal” I’ve had before about my own life, and what I understand to be intellectual virtue.