If you didn’t read the post and are complaining that the short summary didn’t contain the details that the full post contained, then
That is very explicitly a strawman of what I am objecting to. As in: that interpretation is explicitly ruled out, multiple times within my comment, including right up at the very top, and so you reaching for it lands with me as deliberately disingenuous.
What I am objecting to is lots and lots and lots of statements that are crafted to confuse/mislead (if not straightforwardly deceive).
Okay, I can respond to the specific intro paragraph talking about this.
But as Jessica notes, many people will only read the summary and it was written with those people in mind. This makes it something of a standalone document, and in my culture would mean that it’s held to a somewhat higher standard of care; there’s a difference between points that are just loosely meant to gesture at longer sections, and points which are known to be [the whole story] for a substantial chunk of the audience. Additionally, it sets the tone for the ten-thousand-or-so words to follow. I sort of fear the impact of the following ten thousand words on people who were just fine with the first three thousand; people whose epistemic immune systems did not boot up right at the start.
I don’t expect people who only read the summary to automatically believe what I’m saying with high confidence. I expect them to believe they have an idea of what I am saying. Once they have this idea, they can decide to investigate or not investigate why I believe these things. If they don’t, they can’t know whether these things are true.
Maybe it messes with people’s immune systems by being misleading… but how could you tell the summary is misleading without reading most of the post? Seems like a circular argument.
It’s not a circular argument. The summary is misleading in its very structure/nature, as I have detailed above at great length. It’s misleading independent of the rest of the post.
Upon going further and reading the rest of the post, I confirmed that the problems evinced by the summary, which I stated up-front might have been addressed within the longer piece (so as not to mislead or confuse any readers of my comment), in fact only get worse.
This is not a piece which visibly tries to, or succeeds at, helping people see and think more clearly. It does the exact opposite, in service of ???
I would be tempted to label this a psy-op, if I thought its confusing and manipulative nature was intentional rather than just something you didn’t actively try not to do.
The passive voice throws me. “I was coerced” reads as a pretty strong statement of fact about the universe; “this simply is.” I would have liked to hear, even in a brief summary paragraph, something more like “I was coerced by A, B, and C, via methods that included X, Y, and Z, into a frame where etc.”
The rest of the paragraph says some parts of how I was coerced, e.g. I was discouraged from engaging with critics of the frame and from publishing my own criticisms.
Ditto “I had reason to fear for my life.” From whom? To what extent? What constitutes [sufficient] reason? Is this a report of fear of being actually murdered? Is this a report of fear of one’s own risk of suicide? To some extent this might be clarified by the followup in Claim 1, but it’s not clear whether Claim 1 covers the whole of that phrase or whether it’s just part of it.
If you keep reading you see that I heard about the possibility of assassination. The suicides are also worrying, although the causality on those is unclear.
Maybe this isn’t a particularly strong argument you gave for the summary being misleading. If so I’d want to know which you think are particularly strong so I don’t have to refute a bunch of weak arguments.
“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?
That is very explicitly a strawman of what I am objecting to. As in: that interpretation is explicitly ruled out, multiple times within my comment, including right up at the very top, and so you reaching for it lands with me as deliberately disingenuous.
What I am objecting to is lots and lots and lots of statements that are crafted to confuse/mislead (if not straightforwardly deceive).
Okay, I can respond to the specific intro paragraph talking about this.
I don’t expect people who only read the summary to automatically believe what I’m saying with high confidence. I expect them to believe they have an idea of what I am saying. Once they have this idea, they can decide to investigate or not investigate why I believe these things. If they don’t, they can’t know whether these things are true.
Maybe it messes with people’s immune systems by being misleading… but how could you tell the summary is misleading without reading most of the post? Seems like a circular argument.
It’s not a circular argument. The summary is misleading in its very structure/nature, as I have detailed above at great length. It’s misleading independent of the rest of the post.
Upon going further and reading the rest of the post, I confirmed that the problems evinced by the summary, which I stated up-front might have been addressed within the longer piece (so as not to mislead or confuse any readers of my comment), in fact only get worse.
This is not a piece which visibly tries to, or succeeds at, helping people see and think more clearly. It does the exact opposite, in service of ???
I would be tempted to label this a psy-op, if I thought its confusing and manipulative nature was intentional rather than just something you didn’t actively try not to do.
Here’s an example (Claim 0):
The rest of the paragraph says some parts of how I was coerced, e.g. I was discouraged from engaging with critics of the frame and from publishing my own criticisms.
If you keep reading you see that I heard about the possibility of assassination. The suicides are also worrying, although the causality on those is unclear.
Maybe this isn’t a particularly strong argument you gave for the summary being misleading. If so I’d want to know which you think are particularly strong so I don’t have to refute a bunch of weak arguments.
“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?