That’s … not a very accurate way of describing what happened. Not because there’s literally no way to understand it that makes it factually correct, but because it gives entirely the wrong impression.
Here’s a more complete description of what happened.
curi came here in early April 2011 (well, he actually first appeared earlier, but before then he made a total of three comments ever) and posted five lengthy top-level posts in five days. They were increasingly badly received by the community, getting scores of −1,-1,-1,-22,-38. The last one was entitled “The conjunction fallacy does not exist” and what it attempted to refute was a completely wrong statement of what the c.f. is about, namely the claim (which no one believes) that “people attribute higher probability to X&Y than to Y” for all X and Y.
As this was happening, more and more of the comments on curi’s posts were along the general lines of this one saying, in essence: This is not productive, you are just repeating the same wrong things without listening to criticism, so please stop.
It was suggested that there was some reason to think curi was using sockpuppets to undo others’ downvotes and keep enough karma to carry on posting.
And then, in that context, curi’s fifth post—which attempted to refute the conjunction fallacy but which completely misunderstood what the conjunction fallacy is, and which was sitting on −38 points—was removed.
Now, maybe that’s because Eliezer was afraid of curi’s ideas and wanted to close down discussion or something of the sort. But a more plausible explanation is that he thought further discussion was likely to be a waste of time for the same reason as several commenters.
I don’t think removing the post was a good decision, and generally I think Eliezer’s moderation has been too heavy-handed on multiple occasions. But I don’t think the kind of explanation curi is offering for this is at all likely to be correct.
On the other hand, if curi is merely saying that Eliezer is unlikely to be interested if curi contacts him and asks for a debate on Bayes versus CR, then I think he’s clearly right about that.
That’s … not a very accurate way of describing what happened. Not because there’s literally no way to understand it that makes it factually correct, but because it gives entirely the wrong impression.
Here’s a more complete description of what happened.
curi came here in early April 2011 (well, he actually first appeared earlier, but before then he made a total of three comments ever) and posted five lengthy top-level posts in five days. They were increasingly badly received by the community, getting scores of −1,-1,-1,-22,-38. The last one was entitled “The conjunction fallacy does not exist” and what it attempted to refute was a completely wrong statement of what the c.f. is about, namely the claim (which no one believes) that “people attribute higher probability to X&Y than to Y” for all X and Y.
As this was happening, more and more of the comments on curi’s posts were along the general lines of this one saying, in essence: This is not productive, you are just repeating the same wrong things without listening to criticism, so please stop.
It was suggested that there was some reason to think curi was using sockpuppets to undo others’ downvotes and keep enough karma to carry on posting.
And then, in that context, curi’s fifth post—which attempted to refute the conjunction fallacy but which completely misunderstood what the conjunction fallacy is, and which was sitting on −38 points—was removed.
Now, maybe that’s because Eliezer was afraid of curi’s ideas and wanted to close down discussion or something of the sort. But a more plausible explanation is that he thought further discussion was likely to be a waste of time for the same reason as several commenters.
I don’t think removing the post was a good decision, and generally I think Eliezer’s moderation has been too heavy-handed on multiple occasions. But I don’t think the kind of explanation curi is offering for this is at all likely to be correct.
On the other hand, if curi is merely saying that Eliezer is unlikely to be interested if curi contacts him and asks for a debate on Bayes versus CR, then I think he’s clearly right about that.