Certainly omnizoid’s post was bad—there’s hardly any disputing that. The ratio of snark to content was egregious, the snark itself was not justified by the number and type of the examples, and the actual examples were highly questionable at best. I think that most folks in this discussion basically agree on this.
(I, personally, also think that omnizoid’s general claim—that Eliezer is “frequently, confidently, egregiously wrong”—is false, regardless of how good or bad are any particular arguments for said claim. On this there may be less general agreement, I am not sure.)
The question before us right now concerns, specifically, whether “put the object-level refutation first, then make comments about the target’s character” is, or is not, a “basic rule of epistemic conduct”. This is a narrow point—an element of “local validity”. As such, the concerns you mention do not bear on it.
Certainly omnizoid’s post was bad—there’s hardly any disputing that. The ratio of snark to content was egregious, the snark itself was not justified by the number and type of the examples, and the actual examples were highly questionable at best. I think that most folks in this discussion basically agree on this.
(I, personally, also think that omnizoid’s general claim—that Eliezer is “frequently, confidently, egregiously wrong”—is false, regardless of how good or bad are any particular arguments for said claim. On this there may be less general agreement, I am not sure.)
The question before us right now concerns, specifically, whether “put the object-level refutation first, then make comments about the target’s character” is, or is not, a “basic rule of epistemic conduct”. This is a narrow point—an element of “local validity”. As such, the concerns you mention do not bear on it.
I dispute that . . .
I think that “the author of the post does not think the post he wrote was bad” is quite sufficiently covered by “hardly any”.
Yeah, I was just kidding!