Huh, I am confused. I have expressed that sentiment multiple times. Here are the quotes:
My very first comment in the thread:
I wouldn’t downvote this comment for most users, but since I’ve seen a lot of threads of this type that were started by you played out, I am more confident than usual about whether I expect the resulting conversation to be valuable, and so feel more comfortable downvoting based on that.
Other occurrences:
As I mentioned in many other places, I am also very confident that dozens of authors have perceived Said’s comments to primarily be social attacks, and have found them to be major obstacles to engaging with LessWrong. Obviously basically all of these comments were on past threads, and not this specific thread, so there is a good chance that I am misunderstanding what precisely is causing their discomfort, but I am reasonably confident that I am identifying this instance as a correct example of the pattern that these authors point me to.
And:
What it demonstrates is that you, and specifically you, do not understand the concept, and that explaining it to you specifically is difficult. Your confusions do very rarely generalize. Your bafflement is not usually reflective of other people’s bafflement, and you not agreeing with a point is only very minor evidence that other people do not agree.
And:
The usual pattern of Said’s comments as I experience them has been (and I think this would be reasonably straightforward to verify):
Said makes a highly upvoted comment asking a question, usually implicitly pointing out something that is unclear to many in the post
Author makes a reasonably highly upvoted reply
Said says that the explanation was basically completely useless to him, this often gets some upvotes, but drastically less than the top-level question
Author tries to clarify some more, this gets much fewer upvotes than the original reply
Said expresses more confusion, this usually gets very few upvotes
More explanations from the author, almost no upvotes
Said expresses more confusion, often being downvoted and the author and others expressing frustration
As I said in my first comment on this thread, I don’t think the original comment is where a lot of the problem lies (and I wouldn’t usually downvote it from most users). The problems usually arise in the follow-up discussion, and in the case of Said, enough authors and users have experienced those follow-up discussions that the problems have backpropagated into a broader aversion to questions like Said’s top-level question.
And to say it very explicitly here. Yes, I am arguing that contextless questions specifically from Said turn out to waste a lot of people’s time and cause a lot of frustration in a highly predictable way.
I don’t have enough context about how “sealioning” is used to judge whether that’s a good fit for this situation, or how politicized that term is, so I don’t think I want to use that term (I had not actually encountered it until yesterday). Though the basic description on Wikipedia seems to relatively accurately describe at least the experience of people engaging with Said (independently of whether it describes the intentions of Said himself).
I agree that you’ve said this multiple times, in multiple places; I wanted you to be able to say it shortly and simply. To be able to do something analogous to saying “from where I’m currently standing, this looks to me like a witchhunt” rather than having to spell out, in many different sentences, what a witchhunt is and why it’s bad and how this situation resembles that one.
My caveats and hedges were mainly not wanting to be seen as putting words in your mouth, or presupposing your endorsement of the particular short sentence I proposed.
Huh, I am confused. I have expressed that sentiment multiple times. Here are the quotes:
My very first comment in the thread:
Other occurrences:
And:
And:
And to say it very explicitly here. Yes, I am arguing that contextless questions specifically from Said turn out to waste a lot of people’s time and cause a lot of frustration in a highly predictable way.
I don’t have enough context about how “sealioning” is used to judge whether that’s a good fit for this situation, or how politicized that term is, so I don’t think I want to use that term (I had not actually encountered it until yesterday). Though the basic description on Wikipedia seems to relatively accurately describe at least the experience of people engaging with Said (independently of whether it describes the intentions of Said himself).
I agree that you’ve said this multiple times, in multiple places; I wanted you to be able to say it shortly and simply. To be able to do something analogous to saying “from where I’m currently standing, this looks to me like a witchhunt” rather than having to spell out, in many different sentences, what a witchhunt is and why it’s bad and how this situation resembles that one.
My caveats and hedges were mainly not wanting to be seen as putting words in your mouth, or presupposing your endorsement of the particular short sentence I proposed.
nods Cool, that clarifies it.