“I’d want to know which arguments you think are particularly strong so I don’t have to refute a bunch of weak ones” is my feeling, here, too.
Would’ve been nice if you’d just stated your claims instead of burying them in 13000 words of meandering, often misleading, not-at-all-upfront-about-epistemic-status insinuation. I’m frustrated because your previous post received exactly this kind of criticism, and that criticism was highly upvoted, and you do not seem to have felt it was worth adjusting your style.
EDIT: A relevant term here is “gish gallop.”
What I am able to gather from the OP is that you believe lots of bad rumors when you hear them, use that already-negative lens to adversarially interpret all subsequent information, get real anxious about it, and … think everyone should know this?
This is a double bind. If I state the claims in the summary I’m being misleading by not providing details or evidence for them close to the claims themselves. If I don’t then I’m doing a “gish gallop” by embedding claims in the body of the post. The post as a whole has lots of numbered lists that make most of the claims I’m making pretty clear.
It’s not a double bind, and my foremost hypothesis is now that you are deliberately strawmanning, so as to avoid addressing my real point.
Not only did I highlight two separate entries in your list of thirteen that do the thing properly, I also provided some example partial rewrites of other entries, some of which made them shorter rather than longer.
The point is not that you need to include more and more detail, and it’s disingenuous to pretend that’s what I’m saying. It’s that you need to be less deceptive and misleading. Say what you think you know, clearly and unambiguously, and say why you think you know it, directly and explicitly, instead of flooding the channel with passive voice and confident summaries that obscure the thick layer of interpretation atop the actual observable facts.
[After writing this comment, I realized that maybe I’m just missing what’s happening altogether, since maybe I read the post in a fairly strongly “sandboxed” way, so I’m failing to empathize with the mental yanks. That said, maybe it has some value.]
FWIW, my sense (not particularly well-founded?) isn’t that jessicata is deliberately strawmanning here, but isn’t getting your point or doesn’t agree.
You write above:
It’s more that, if you can’t say something more clear and less confusing (/outright misleading) than something like this, then I think you should not include any such sentence at all.
This is sort of mixing multiple things together: there’s the clarity/confusingness, and then there’s the slant/misleadingness. These are related, in that one can mislead more easily when one is being unclear/ambiguous.
You write:
Say what you think you know, clearly and unambiguously, and say why you think you know it, directly and explicitly, instead of flooding the channel with passive voice and confident summaries that obscure the thick layer of interpretation atop the actual observable facts.
Some of your original criticisms read, to me, more like asking a bunch of questions about details (which is a reasonable thing to do; some questions are answered in the post, some not), and then saying that the summary claims are bad for not including those details and instead summarizing them at a higher level. (Other of your criticisms are more directly about misleadingness IMO, e.g. the false dichotomy thing.)
E.g. you write:
The phrase “many others have worked to conceal the circumstances of their deaths due to infohazard concerns” unambiguously implies something like a conspiracy, or at least a deliberate deceptiveness on the part of five-plus (?) people. This is quite a strong claim. It seems to me that it could in fact be true. In worlds where it is true, I think that (even in the summary) it should be straightforward about who it is accusing, and of what. “Many others” should be replaced with a list of names, or at least a magnitude; is it four? Fourteen? Forty? “Worked to conceal” should tell me whether there were lies told, or whether evidence was destroyed, or whether people were bribed or threatened, or whether people simply played things close to the vest.
The phrase “many others have worked to conceal the circumstances of their deaths due to infohazard concerns” seems to me (and I initially read it as) making a straightforward factual claim: many people took actions that prevented the circumstances of their deaths from being known; and they did so because they were worried about something about infohazards. That sentence definitely doesn’t unambiguously imply a conspiracy, since it doesn’t say anything about conspiracy (though the alleged fact it expresses is of course relevant to conspiracy hypotheses). You’re then saying that there was insufficient detail to support this supposed implication. To me it just looks like a reasonable way of compressing a longer list of facts.
I don’t think I’m getting where you’re coming from here. From this:
But the claim leaves me with a tinge of “this is MIRI’s fault” and I don’t like having to swallow that tinge without knowing where it came from and whether I can trust the process that created it.
it sounds like you’re interpreting jessicata’s statements as being aimed at getting you to make a judgement, and also it was sort of working, or it would/could have been sort of working if you weren’t being vigilant. Like, something about reading that part of the post, led to you having a sense that “this is MIRI’s fault”, and then you noticed that on reflection the sense seemed incorrect. Is that right?
“I’d want to know which arguments you think are particularly strong so I don’t have to refute a bunch of weak ones” is my feeling, here, too.
Would’ve been nice if you’d just stated your claims instead of burying them in 13000 words of meandering, often misleading, not-at-all-upfront-about-epistemic-status insinuation. I’m frustrated because your previous post received exactly this kind of criticism, and that criticism was highly upvoted, and you do not seem to have felt it was worth adjusting your style.
EDIT: A relevant term here is “gish gallop.”
What I am able to gather from the OP is that you believe lots of bad rumors when you hear them, use that already-negative lens to adversarially interpret all subsequent information, get real anxious about it, and … think everyone should know this?
This is a double bind. If I state the claims in the summary I’m being misleading by not providing details or evidence for them close to the claims themselves. If I don’t then I’m doing a “gish gallop” by embedding claims in the body of the post. The post as a whole has lots of numbered lists that make most of the claims I’m making pretty clear.
It’s not a double bind, and my foremost hypothesis is now that you are deliberately strawmanning, so as to avoid addressing my real point.
Not only did I highlight two separate entries in your list of thirteen that do the thing properly, I also provided some example partial rewrites of other entries, some of which made them shorter rather than longer.
The point is not that you need to include more and more detail, and it’s disingenuous to pretend that’s what I’m saying. It’s that you need to be less deceptive and misleading. Say what you think you know, clearly and unambiguously, and say why you think you know it, directly and explicitly, instead of flooding the channel with passive voice and confident summaries that obscure the thick layer of interpretation atop the actual observable facts.
[After writing this comment, I realized that maybe I’m just missing what’s happening altogether, since maybe I read the post in a fairly strongly “sandboxed” way, so I’m failing to empathize with the mental yanks. That said, maybe it has some value.]
FWIW, my sense (not particularly well-founded?) isn’t that jessicata is deliberately strawmanning here, but isn’t getting your point or doesn’t agree.
You write above:
This is sort of mixing multiple things together: there’s the clarity/confusingness, and then there’s the slant/misleadingness. These are related, in that one can mislead more easily when one is being unclear/ambiguous.
You write:
Some of your original criticisms read, to me, more like asking a bunch of questions about details (which is a reasonable thing to do; some questions are answered in the post, some not), and then saying that the summary claims are bad for not including those details and instead summarizing them at a higher level. (Other of your criticisms are more directly about misleadingness IMO, e.g. the false dichotomy thing.)
E.g. you write:
The phrase “many others have worked to conceal the circumstances of their deaths due to infohazard concerns” seems to me (and I initially read it as) making a straightforward factual claim: many people took actions that prevented the circumstances of their deaths from being known; and they did so because they were worried about something about infohazards. That sentence definitely doesn’t unambiguously imply a conspiracy, since it doesn’t say anything about conspiracy (though the alleged fact it expresses is of course relevant to conspiracy hypotheses). You’re then saying that there was insufficient detail to support this supposed implication. To me it just looks like a reasonable way of compressing a longer list of facts.
I don’t think I’m getting where you’re coming from here. From this:
it sounds like you’re interpreting jessicata’s statements as being aimed at getting you to make a judgement, and also it was sort of working, or it would/could have been sort of working if you weren’t being vigilant. Like, something about reading that part of the post, led to you having a sense that “this is MIRI’s fault”, and then you noticed that on reflection the sense seemed incorrect. Is that right?