I agree that Zack’s point can sort of be unclear. To me his vibe doesn’t come off as mostly focusing on trans etiology, but instead as a three-step argument about what the rationalist community should acknowledge, with most of the focus being on the first step:
You can’t just use redefinitions to turn trans women similar to cis women.
Trans women start out much more similar to cis men than to cis women, and transitioning doesn’t do very much.
Therefore transness causes a lot of political problems.
However, this doesn’t match Zack’s official position. While his official position starts the same way with arguing about definition, the followup seems to be that the conflict exists because the rationalist community is trying to make him transition for bad reasons, e.g.:
Who would have thought getting @ESYudkowsky’s robot cult to stop trying to trick me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical facts determining whether or not I should cut my dick off) would involve so much math?? OK, I guess the math part isn’t surprising, but—
Or
I didn’t think it was fair to ordinary people to expect them to go as deep into the philosophy-of-language weeds as I could before being allowed to object to this kind of chicanery. I thought “pragmatic” reasons to not just use the natural clustering that you would get by impartially running a clustering algorithm on the subspace of configuration space relevant to your goals, basically amounted to “wireheading” (optimizing someone’s map for looking good rather than reflecting the territory) or “war” (optimizing someone’s map to not reflect the territory in order to manipulate them). If I were to transition today and didn’t pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn’t. That’s not a nice thing to do to a rationalist.
I sort of have trouble buying this explanation of his motivation though because he spends weirdly little time trying to communicate his priorities and concerns and such when it comes to transitioning. But if I pretend to believe it, here’s what I would say:
Zack’s primary concern seems to be that he wouldn’t pass if he transitioned, and that this would make his transition bad. Now it’s true that trans-focused rationalists probably encourage him to transition despite this, but it’s not so clear that this is wrong of them.
There are lots of trans women who don’t pass, and most of them don’t think it was a mistake for them to transition. If rationalists just decide on transition advice based on pattern-matching, this might make it natural to recommend him to transition. Now there are some ways in which this advice might fail, but each of them has challenges:
Maybe he’s different from those other trans women, but in that case it seems like a problem that he keeps insisting he is the same as them.
Maybe those trans women are wrong about whether it was a good idea for them to transition, but Zack hasn’t done much to argue for that.
Maybe it was selfish for them to transition; good for themselves at the cost of others.
Zack also hasn’t hugely argued for the third one, though he has argued more for it than the others, so maybe it is his position. Arguably he is combining both the second and the third positions.
You can’t just use redefinitions to turn trans women similar to cis women.
Definitions are on a map. Similarity means “having some property in common”, which in general is in the territory, but the perception of similarity depends on which properties we are noticing, so it is influenced by the map.
(For a mathematician, an ellipse is similar to a hyperbole, because both are conic sections. For a non-mathematician, the ellipse is a lame circle, and the hyperbole is two crooked lines; not similar.)
You can’t use a redefinition to conjure a property that didn’t exist before, but you can use it to draw attention to an already existing property.
(We have already successfully “redefined” dolphins to mammals. Previously they were considered fish. The fact that they live in water did not change.)
So the question is, which properties do trans women and cis women have in common (this cannot be redefined) and which properties we are paying attention to (this can be redefined).
Trans women start out much more similar to cis men than to cis women, and transitioning doesn’t do very much.
Maybe yes, maybe no; where is the evidence? (I am focusing on the first part of the sentence. I assume that by “transitioning” you refer to the act of coming out as trans, not to hormonal therapy.)
the rationalist community is trying to make him transition for bad reasons
Speaking for myself, I don’t care whether Zack transitions or what his reasons would be. Perhaps we should make a poll, and then Zack might find out that the people who are “trying to make him transition for bad reasons” (“trying to trick me into cutting my dick off”) are actually quite rare, maybe completely nonexistent.
If I were to transition today and didn’t pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn’t. That’s not a nice thing to do to a rationalist.
By this logic, any politeness is wireheading. If you want to know whether you are passing, perhaps you could ask directly. In that case, I agree that lying would be a sin against rationality. But in the usual social situation… if I meet a cis woman who looks not very feminine, I am not giving her unsolicited feedback either.
Too bad we can’t predict whether Zack would pass before he actually goes ahead and transitions.
Maybe he’s different from those other trans women, but in that case it seems like a problem that he keeps insisting he is the same as them.
Yeah, this is exactly my problem with Zack’s statements. I am okay with him making plausibly sounding statements about himself, but when he tries to makes statements about others (who seem to disagree?), I demand evidence.
Speaking for myself, I don’t care whether Zack transitions or what his reasons would be. Perhaps we should make a poll, and then Zack might find out that the people who are “trying to make him transition for bad reasons” (“trying to trick me into cutting my dick off”) are actually quite rare, maybe completely nonexistent.
As a historical analogy, imagine a feminist saying that society is trying to make her into a housewife for bad reasons. ChatGPT suggests Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). Some man replies that “Speaking for myself, I don’t care whether Simone becomes a housewife or what her reasons would be. Perhaps we should make a poll, and then Simone might find out that the people who are ‘trying to make her a housewife for bad reasons’ are actually quite rare, maybe completely nonexistent”.
Well, probably very few people were still trying to make Simone into a housewife after she started writing thousands of words on feminism! But also, society can collectively pressure Simone to conform even if very few people know who Simone is, let alone have an opinion on her career choices.
Many other analogies possible, I picked this one for aesthetic reasons, please don’t read too much into it.
You can’t just use redefinitions to turn trans women similar to cis women.
What does this mean? It seems like if the original issue is something about whether to call an XY-er “she” if the XY-er asks for that, then, that’s sort of like a redefinition and sort of not like a redefinition… Is the claim something like:
Eliezer wants to redefine “woman” to mean “anyone who asks to be called ‘she’ ”. But there’s an objective cluster, and just reshuffling pronouns doesn’t make someone jump from being typical of one cluster to typical of the other.
Trans women start out much more similar to cis men than to cis women, and transitioning doesn’t do very much.
This one is a set of empirical, objective claims.… but elsewhere you said:
Focusing on brains seems like the wrong question to me. Brains matter due to their effect on psychology, and psychology is easier to observe than neurology.
Even if psychology is similar in some ways, it may not be similar in the ways that matter though, and in fact the ways that matter need not be restricted to psychology. Even if trans women are psychologically the same as cis women, trans women in women’s sports is still a contentious issue.
So I guess that was representing your viewpoint, not Zack’s?
What does this mean? It seems like if the original issue is something about whether to call an XY-er “she” if the XY-er asks for that, then,
My understanding of Zack’s position is that he fixated on this because it’s something with a clear right answer that has been documented in the Sequences, and that he was really just using this as the first step to getting the rationalist community to not make him transition.
that’s sort of like a redefinition and sort of not like a redefinition...
Arguably what “it is” depends on why people are doing it. Zack has written extensive responses to different justifications for doing it. I can link you a relevant response and summarize it, but in order to do that I need to know what your justification is.
This one is a set of empirical, objective claims.… but elsewhere you said:
The latter was representing my viewpoint whereas the former was an attempt at representing Zack’s viewpoint, but also I don’t think the two views are contradictory with each other?
This still doesn’t seem to address the root issue that Villiam raised, of why should a random passing reader care enough about someone’s gender self-perceptions/self-declarations/etc… to actually read such long rambling essays?
Caring about someone’s sex maybe, since there’s a biological basis that is falsifiable.
But gender is just too wishy washy in comparison for some random passing reader to plausibly care so much and spend hours of their time on this.
See, this is an example of the bad faith engagement that lies close to the core of this controversy.
People who do not care about a post click away from it. They do not make picket signs about how much they don’t care and socially shame the poster for making posts that aren’t aimed at random passing readers. Whether a post is aimed at random passing readers is an abysmally poor criterion for evaluating the merits of posts in a forum that is already highly technical and full of posts for specialist audiences, and in point of fact several readers did care enough to spend hours of their time on it.
This seems incoherent considering I already addressed Zack’s point, in a direct reply, 3d ago, just one comment chain down, along with several other folks weighing in.
So I’ll assume you haven’t read them. Here’s my other comment reposted here:
They might be interested in information presented in a concise, high signal way.
The way you’ve presented it practically guarantees that nearly every passing reader will not.
i.e. The average reader ‘might be interested’ only to an average degree.
The ‘random passing reader’ refers to all readers within a few standard deviations of the average, but not to literally every single reader.
i.e. Those who have no strong views regarding Zack either way.
Hence it’s unsurprising, and implied, that there are outliers.
That incoherence you speak of is precisely what my previous comment pointed out, and it pertains to your argument rather than mine. As my previous comment explained, engaging with a post even just to call it uninteresting undermines any proclamation that you do not care about the post. If your engagement is more substantive than this, then that only further calls into question the need to shame the author for making posts that random passing readers might not care about.
Edited to add:
The ‘random passing reader’ refers to all readers within a few standard deviations of the average, but not to literally every single reader.
i.e. Those who have no strong views regarding Zack either way.
Hence it’s unsurprising, and implied, that there are outliers.
Are you confused about this terminology?
If the outliers are sufficiently many to generate this much discussion, and they include such notable community members as Said Achmiz, then the critique that random passing readers might not spend hours on it is clearly asinine, regardless of the exact amount of standard deviations you include. I am not “confused about this terminology”, I am just calling out your bad faith engagement.
This is just incoherent, and quite oddly aimed, sorry to say.
At best it reads like a series of emotional insinuations on another LW user’s motivations, rationale, etc… for posting. At worst, it reads like someone who’s totally lost the plot.
i.e. If you think my prior comments were somehow low quality or disparaging Zack in any way whatsoever, then why write something even worse and closer to random noise?
Shouldn’t you be posting even higher quality and better reasoned out comments, to convince other readers that it’s not just posturing and empty talk?
You are not even pretending to address the argument at this point, you are merely insulting it and me. I think your latest reply here speaks for itself.
You are not even pretending to address the argument at this point, you are merely insulting it and me. I think your latest reply here speaks for itself.
There hasn’t been a coherent argument presented yet, hence why I directly pointed out the incoherency…
Since this is the second deflection in a row, I’ll give one more chance to answer the previous direct questions:
Are you confused about this terminology?
...
i.e. If you think my prior comments were somehow low quality or disparaging Zack in any way whatsoever, then why write something even worse and closer to random noise?
Shouldn’t you be posting even higher quality and better reasoned out comments, to convince other readers that it’s not just posturing and empty talk?
And if you don’t want to answer the second two questions, which is totally your prerogative, then at least answer the first direct question? Otherwise of course I’m not going to be ‘pretending to address’ any subsequent deflections… there’s no reason for me to deviate from sticking to the chronological ordering of comments.
There hasn’t been a coherent argument presented yet, hence why I directly pointed out the incoherency…
No, you did not, you added a fact that further corroborated the argument, as my reply showed.
Since this is the second deflection in a row, I’ll give one more chance to answer the previous direct questions:
I have already directly answered the first question: no, I am not confused about the terminology. I have also answered the assumptions implicit in the question and shown why the question was irrelevant. Of course, both that one and the subsequent questions were merely insults disguised as questions, and your accusation that I am deflecting is mere hypocrisy and projection.
Your opinions regarding all these supposed negative characteristics do not outweigh anyone else’s, nor my own, so it seems unproductive.
I acknowledge my own comments may seem to be low quality or ‘bad’ in your eyes, but to post even lower quality replies is self-defeating.
Where are your manners?
i.e. My manners in comment writing, even though they may be low quality or detestable in your opinion, are still higher quality than what has been demonstrated so far here:
...
If the outliers are sufficiently many to generate this much discussion, and they include such notable community members as Said Achmiz, then the critique that random passing readers might not spend hours on it is clearly asinine, regardless of the exact amount of standard deviations you include. I am not “confused about this terminology”, I am just calling out your bad faith engagement.
Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Can you offer some actual proof or substantive backing, not in edited comments, for at least half of all the stuff written so far?
I acknowledge my own comments may seem to be low quality or ‘bad’ in your eyes, but to post even lower quality replies is self-defeating.
I didn’t. Mine at least contained actual arguments.
Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
The text you quoted makes a specific argument that you once again chose to simply insult instead of addressing it. Again, your behaviour speaks for itself.
At this point it has become abundantly clear that you are simply a troll, so I will not bother to engage with you henceforth.
Like I said, one person’s opinions regarding the supposed characteristics of another’s comments simply cannot outweigh the opinions of anyone else. Plus I imagine on LW many readers can see through the superficial layer of words.
But if you genuinely want to productively engage, I’ll give one final chance:
Can you offer some actual proof or substantive backing, not in edited comments, for at least half of all the stuff written so far?
Like I said, one person’s opinions regarding the supposed characteristics of another’s comments simply cannot outweigh the opinions of anyone else.
Utterly irrelevant since I never asked anybody to take my opinions as outweighing their own.
But if you genuinely want to productively engage, I’ll give one final chance:
Can you offer some actual proof or substantive backing, not in edited comments, for at least half of all the stuff written so far?
Again, I have already presented arguments for my case. If you do not consider them sufficiently substantive, then I invite you to tell me what you see as the flaw, or why you deem them insufficient.
Utterly irrelevant since I never asked anybody to take my opinions as outweighing their own.
Again, I have already presented arguments for my case.
This is your own opinion that’s being made to sound as if they are incontestable facts… every comment sounds like this.
My opinion is the opposite and at least equally valid. So anyone can endlessly negate just by expressing the opposite opinion, hence it’s unproductive. You need to list out actual arguments, proofs, analysis, or any falsifiable claims, etc… that satisfy the criteria of the counter-party.
Whether or not they satisfy your own criteria is irrelevant to this point, and just saying it’s the truth won’t convince the counter-party. And if you still can’t accept this, then do not engage, I won’t be offended.
Since you seem to have completely lost track of what actually happened, I will remind you:
Zack made this post and was met with a barrage of abuse
Some of the abusers were blaming Zack for making a post that random passersby might not care about
I pointed out that the people making this critique had in fact interacted much more with the post than somebody who genuinely wouldn’t care
You pointed out that these people had interacted with the post in ways beside the one I just mentioned
I pointed out that this obviously corroborates my point rather than detracting from it
Instead of addressing this obvious point, you just called it incoherent and started delivering a barrage of insults instead of making any actual arguments
Ie. you are the one just asserting opinions, whereas I made arguments, and then pointed out the arguments when you denied their existence, and now you seem to be asserting that your opinion is just as valid as mine, a thinly veiled “that’s just your opinion, man”, while still ignoring the actual arguments rather than actually addressing them. That is insane.
Ie. you are the one just asserting opinions, whereas I made arguments, …
This is in itself another opinion… Did you genuinely not read my previous comment to the end?
Whether or not they satisfy your own criteria is irrelevant to this point, and just saying it’s the truth won’t convince the counter-party.
i.e. You need to convince me, not yourself. And the previous opinions are just not convincing, to me, as coherent ‘arguments’. Period.
No amount of futile replies can alter the past, unless you edit the comments, which would create its own credibility problems. We can agree to disagree and move on.
I can’t possibly hope to convince you when you are engaging in abysmally bad faith. My purpose is to call you out, because you should not be getting away with this shit.
On another note, I did in fact “list out actual arguments”, exactly as you said. I can only surmise that they didn’t satisfy the “criteria of the counter-party”, and for some unguessable (/s) reason, you once again will not give even the slightest indication of what you deem to be insufficient about them.
How exactly am I supposed to convince an interlocutor who will not even explain why he is unmoved by the arguments provided? Again, this is insane.
Do you realize I can see when you’ve posted replies and then ‘deleted them without a trace’ immediately afterwards? The mods can too.
It’s a feature of the LW notifications system, with the right timing. So there’s no use in pretending.
I didn’t want to call this out before, but it’s important to set the record straight. And the mods will back me up here.
I can’t possibly hope to convince you when you are engaging in abysmally bad faith. My purpose is to call you out, because you should not be getting away with this shit.
Anyways, just going by the writing that is considered not too embarrassing to delete, it’s clear who has the better manners in comment writing.
Do you realize I can see when you’ve posted replies and then ‘deleted them without trace’ immediately afterwards? The mods can too.
For any others wondering, the deleted comment simply said ”… That’s what I get for engaging with a blatant troll”, or something to that effect. It was because M. Y. Zuo’s manipulative bs had made me forget my actual reasons for engaging, and I deleted the comment when I remembered what they were.
But it seems superfluous at this point, since any reasonable person can tell that M. Y. Zuo’s behaviour is absolutely reprehensible. But I also have to admit that any such person can also tell that I’ve “bitten the bait” and engaged with him too long, to the point where my behaviour has become ridiculous and embarrassing.
There is a lot of wisdom to Mark Twain’s admonition to never argue with a fool, lest they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience — wisdom which, I am sorry to report, I seem to have not yet learned.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions, since the precise wording must have been very embarrassing to intentionally delete without a trace, I won’t pry, and I’ll let bygones be bygones.
It wasn’t my intention to drive you into a hopeless corner, since it seems there was substantial agitation from close to the beginning, but it’s hard to ignore deception and false pretences when the LW forum software is literally notifying me of it.
I understand it can be a bit scary and frustrating when someone much more experienced and well established takes a counter-argument line, so I won’t provoke whatever root issue(s) is lying beneath all this but I do hope there’s some value in what’s been written.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions, since the precise wording must have been very embarrassing to intentionally delete without a trace, I won’t pry, and I’ll let bygones be bygones.
I already told you what the comment said. I deleted it not because I thought it was embarrassing, but because I thought it was irrelevant.
Is there some way for moderators or admins to identify the content of a deleted comment? If so, I give my permission for them to do so and state publicly what it contained.
I understand it can be a bit scary and frustrating when someone much more experienced and well established takes a counter-argument line
I have been in this community for over ten years.
This latest comment of yours is utterly disgraceful and contemptible by any reasonable standard. Purely an attempt to humiliate me, and on an entirely speculative basis. So much for “letting bygones be bygones”, eh?
EDIT: I wanted to say it was an interesting discussion to be polite, but the juvenile insults and mud slinging tactics are obvious enough that probably zero passing readers would believe it.
why should a random passing reader care enough [...] to actually read such long rambling essays?
I mean, they probably shouldn’t? When I write a blog post, it’s because I selfishly had something I wanted to say. Obviously, I understand that people who think it’s boring aren’t going to read it! Not everyone needs to read every blog post! That’s why we have a karma system, to help people make prioritization decisions about what to read.
I thought people were supposed to care because you were highlighting systematic political distortions in the rationalist community?
I didn’t mention that part in my other comment because Villiam seemed confused about the inner part of the conflict whereas this seemed like the outer part of the conflict.
I mean, yes, people who care about this alleged “rationalist community” thing might be interested in information about it being biased (and I wrote this post with such readers in mind), but if someone is completely uninterested in the “rationalist community” and is only on this website because they followed a link to an article about information theory, I’d say that’s a pretty good life decision!
I agree that Zack’s point can sort of be unclear. To me his vibe doesn’t come off as mostly focusing on trans etiology, but instead as a three-step argument about what the rationalist community should acknowledge, with most of the focus being on the first step:
You can’t just use redefinitions to turn trans women similar to cis women.
Trans women start out much more similar to cis men than to cis women, and transitioning doesn’t do very much.
Therefore transness causes a lot of political problems.
However, this doesn’t match Zack’s official position. While his official position starts the same way with arguing about definition, the followup seems to be that the conflict exists because the rationalist community is trying to make him transition for bad reasons, e.g.:
Or
I sort of have trouble buying this explanation of his motivation though because he spends weirdly little time trying to communicate his priorities and concerns and such when it comes to transitioning. But if I pretend to believe it, here’s what I would say:
Zack’s primary concern seems to be that he wouldn’t pass if he transitioned, and that this would make his transition bad. Now it’s true that trans-focused rationalists probably encourage him to transition despite this, but it’s not so clear that this is wrong of them.
There are lots of trans women who don’t pass, and most of them don’t think it was a mistake for them to transition. If rationalists just decide on transition advice based on pattern-matching, this might make it natural to recommend him to transition. Now there are some ways in which this advice might fail, but each of them has challenges:
Maybe he’s different from those other trans women, but in that case it seems like a problem that he keeps insisting he is the same as them.
Maybe those trans women are wrong about whether it was a good idea for them to transition, but Zack hasn’t done much to argue for that.
Maybe it was selfish for them to transition; good for themselves at the cost of others.
Zack also hasn’t hugely argued for the third one, though he has argued more for it than the others, so maybe it is his position. Arguably he is combining both the second and the third positions.
Definitions are on a map. Similarity means “having some property in common”, which in general is in the territory, but the perception of similarity depends on which properties we are noticing, so it is influenced by the map.
(For a mathematician, an ellipse is similar to a hyperbole, because both are conic sections. For a non-mathematician, the ellipse is a lame circle, and the hyperbole is two crooked lines; not similar.)
You can’t use a redefinition to conjure a property that didn’t exist before, but you can use it to draw attention to an already existing property.
(We have already successfully “redefined” dolphins to mammals. Previously they were considered fish. The fact that they live in water did not change.)
So the question is, which properties do trans women and cis women have in common (this cannot be redefined) and which properties we are paying attention to (this can be redefined).
Maybe yes, maybe no; where is the evidence? (I am focusing on the first part of the sentence. I assume that by “transitioning” you refer to the act of coming out as trans, not to hormonal therapy.)
Speaking for myself, I don’t care whether Zack transitions or what his reasons would be. Perhaps we should make a poll, and then Zack might find out that the people who are “trying to make him transition for bad reasons” (“trying to trick me into cutting my dick off”) are actually quite rare, maybe completely nonexistent.
By this logic, any politeness is wireheading. If you want to know whether you are passing, perhaps you could ask directly. In that case, I agree that lying would be a sin against rationality. But in the usual social situation… if I meet a cis woman who looks not very feminine, I am not giving her unsolicited feedback either.
Too bad we can’t predict whether Zack would pass before he actually goes ahead and transitions.
Yeah, this is exactly my problem with Zack’s statements. I am okay with him making plausibly sounding statements about himself, but when he tries to makes statements about others (who seem to disagree?), I demand evidence.
As a historical analogy, imagine a feminist saying that society is trying to make her into a housewife for bad reasons. ChatGPT suggests Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). Some man replies that “Speaking for myself, I don’t care whether Simone becomes a housewife or what her reasons would be. Perhaps we should make a poll, and then Simone might find out that the people who are ‘trying to make her a housewife for bad reasons’ are actually quite rare, maybe completely nonexistent”.
Well, probably very few people were still trying to make Simone into a housewife after she started writing thousands of words on feminism! But also, society can collectively pressure Simone to conform even if very few people know who Simone is, let alone have an opinion on her career choices.
Many other analogies possible, I picked this one for aesthetic reasons, please don’t read too much into it.
What does this mean? It seems like if the original issue is something about whether to call an XY-er “she” if the XY-er asks for that, then, that’s sort of like a redefinition and sort of not like a redefinition… Is the claim something like:
This one is a set of empirical, objective claims.… but elsewhere you said:
So I guess that was representing your viewpoint, not Zack’s?
My understanding of Zack’s position is that he fixated on this because it’s something with a clear right answer that has been documented in the Sequences, and that he was really just using this as the first step to getting the rationalist community to not make him transition.
Arguably what “it is” depends on why people are doing it. Zack has written extensive responses to different justifications for doing it. I can link you a relevant response and summarize it, but in order to do that I need to know what your justification is.
The latter was representing my viewpoint whereas the former was an attempt at representing Zack’s viewpoint, but also I don’t think the two views are contradictory with each other?
This still doesn’t seem to address the root issue that Villiam raised, of why should a random passing reader care enough about someone’s gender self-perceptions/self-declarations/etc… to actually read such long rambling essays?
Caring about someone’s sex maybe, since there’s a biological basis that is falsifiable.
But gender is just too wishy washy in comparison for some random passing reader to plausibly care so much and spend hours of their time on this.
See, this is an example of the bad faith engagement that lies close to the core of this controversy.
People who do not care about a post click away from it. They do not make picket signs about how much they don’t care and socially shame the poster for making posts that aren’t aimed at random passing readers. Whether a post is aimed at random passing readers is an abysmally poor criterion for evaluating the merits of posts in a forum that is already highly technical and full of posts for specialist audiences, and in point of fact several readers did care enough to spend hours of their time on it.
This seems incoherent considering I already addressed Zack’s point, in a direct reply, 3d ago, just one comment chain down, along with several other folks weighing in.
So I’ll assume you haven’t read them. Here’s my other comment reposted here:
The ‘random passing reader’ refers to all readers within a few standard deviations of the average, but not to literally every single reader.
i.e. Those who have no strong views regarding Zack either way.
Hence it’s unsurprising, and implied, that there are outliers.
Are you confused about this terminology?
That incoherence you speak of is precisely what my previous comment pointed out, and it pertains to your argument rather than mine. As my previous comment explained, engaging with a post even just to call it uninteresting undermines any proclamation that you do not care about the post. If your engagement is more substantive than this, then that only further calls into question the need to shame the author for making posts that random passing readers might not care about.
Edited to add:
If the outliers are sufficiently many to generate this much discussion, and they include such notable community members as Said Achmiz, then the critique that random passing readers might not spend hours on it is clearly asinine, regardless of the exact amount of standard deviations you include. I am not “confused about this terminology”, I am just calling out your bad faith engagement.
This is just incoherent, and quite oddly aimed, sorry to say.
At best it reads like a series of emotional insinuations on another LW user’s motivations, rationale, etc… for posting. At worst, it reads like someone who’s totally lost the plot.
i.e. If you think my prior comments were somehow low quality or disparaging Zack in any way whatsoever, then why write something even worse and closer to random noise?
Shouldn’t you be posting even higher quality and better reasoned out comments, to convince other readers that it’s not just posturing and empty talk?
You are not even pretending to address the argument at this point, you are merely insulting it and me. I think your latest reply here speaks for itself.
There hasn’t been a coherent argument presented yet, hence why I directly pointed out the incoherency…
Since this is the second deflection in a row, I’ll give one more chance to answer the previous direct questions:
And if you don’t want to answer the second two questions, which is totally your prerogative, then at least answer the first direct question? Otherwise of course I’m not going to be ‘pretending to address’ any subsequent deflections… there’s no reason for me to deviate from sticking to the chronological ordering of comments.
No, you did not, you added a fact that further corroborated the argument, as my reply showed.
I have already directly answered the first question: no, I am not confused about the terminology. I have also answered the assumptions implicit in the question and shown why the question was irrelevant. Of course, both that one and the subsequent questions were merely insults disguised as questions, and your accusation that I am deflecting is mere hypocrisy and projection.
Where are your manners?
I’m getting tired of this back and forth.
Your opinions regarding all these supposed negative characteristics do not outweigh anyone else’s, nor my own, so it seems unproductive.
I acknowledge my own comments may seem to be low quality or ‘bad’ in your eyes, but to post even lower quality replies is self-defeating.
i.e. My manners in comment writing, even though they may be low quality or detestable in your opinion, are still higher quality than what has been demonstrated so far here:
Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Can you offer some actual proof or substantive backing, not in edited comments, for at least half of all the stuff written so far?
I didn’t. Mine at least contained actual arguments.
The text you quoted makes a specific argument that you once again chose to simply insult instead of addressing it. Again, your behaviour speaks for itself.
At this point it has become abundantly clear that you are simply a troll, so I will not bother to engage with you henceforth.
Like I said, one person’s opinions regarding the supposed characteristics of another’s comments simply cannot outweigh the opinions of anyone else. Plus I imagine on LW many readers can see through the superficial layer of words.
But if you genuinely want to productively engage, I’ll give one final chance:
Utterly irrelevant since I never asked anybody to take my opinions as outweighing their own.
Again, I have already presented arguments for my case. If you do not consider them sufficiently substantive, then I invite you to tell me what you see as the flaw, or why you deem them insufficient.
This is your own opinion that’s being made to sound as if they are incontestable facts… every comment sounds like this.
My opinion is the opposite and at least equally valid. So anyone can endlessly negate just by expressing the opposite opinion, hence it’s unproductive. You need to list out actual arguments, proofs, analysis, or any falsifiable claims, etc… that satisfy the criteria of the counter-party.
Whether or not they satisfy your own criteria is irrelevant to this point, and just saying it’s the truth won’t convince the counter-party. And if you still can’t accept this, then do not engage, I won’t be offended.
Since you seem to have completely lost track of what actually happened, I will remind you:
Zack made this post and was met with a barrage of abuse
Some of the abusers were blaming Zack for making a post that random passersby might not care about
I pointed out that the people making this critique had in fact interacted much more with the post than somebody who genuinely wouldn’t care
You pointed out that these people had interacted with the post in ways beside the one I just mentioned
I pointed out that this obviously corroborates my point rather than detracting from it
Instead of addressing this obvious point, you just called it incoherent and started delivering a barrage of insults instead of making any actual arguments
Ie. you are the one just asserting opinions, whereas I made arguments, and then pointed out the arguments when you denied their existence, and now you seem to be asserting that your opinion is just as valid as mine, a thinly veiled “that’s just your opinion, man”, while still ignoring the actual arguments rather than actually addressing them. That is insane.
This is in itself another opinion… Did you genuinely not read my previous comment to the end?
i.e. You need to convince me, not yourself. And the previous opinions are just not convincing, to me, as coherent ‘arguments’. Period.
No amount of futile replies can alter the past, unless you edit the comments, which would create its own credibility problems. We can agree to disagree and move on.
I can’t possibly hope to convince you when you are engaging in abysmally bad faith. My purpose is to call you out, because you should not be getting away with this shit.
On another note, I did in fact “list out actual arguments”, exactly as you said. I can only surmise that they didn’t satisfy the “criteria of the counter-party”, and for some unguessable (/s) reason, you once again will not give even the slightest indication of what you deem to be insufficient about them.
How exactly am I supposed to convince an interlocutor who will not even explain why he is unmoved by the arguments provided? Again, this is insane.
Do you realize I can see when you’ve posted replies and then ‘deleted them without a trace’ immediately afterwards? The mods can too.
It’s a feature of the LW notifications system, with the right timing. So there’s no use in pretending.
I didn’t want to call this out before, but it’s important to set the record straight. And the mods will back me up here.
Anyways, just going by the writing that is considered not too embarrassing to delete, it’s clear who has the better manners in comment writing.
For any others wondering, the deleted comment simply said ”… That’s what I get for engaging with a blatant troll”, or something to that effect. It was because M. Y. Zuo’s manipulative bs had made me forget my actual reasons for engaging, and I deleted the comment when I remembered what they were.
But it seems superfluous at this point, since any reasonable person can tell that M. Y. Zuo’s behaviour is absolutely reprehensible. But I also have to admit that any such person can also tell that I’ve “bitten the bait” and engaged with him too long, to the point where my behaviour has become ridiculous and embarrassing.
There is a lot of wisdom to Mark Twain’s admonition to never argue with a fool, lest they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience — wisdom which, I am sorry to report, I seem to have not yet learned.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions, since the precise wording must have been very embarrassing to intentionally delete without a trace, I won’t pry, and I’ll let bygones be bygones.
It wasn’t my intention to drive you into a hopeless corner, since it seems there was substantial agitation from close to the beginning, but it’s hard to ignore deception and false pretences when the LW forum software is literally notifying me of it.
I understand it can be a bit scary and frustrating when someone much more experienced and well established takes a counter-argument line, so I won’t provoke whatever root issue(s) is lying beneath all this but I do hope there’s some value in what’s been written.
I already told you what the comment said. I deleted it not because I thought it was embarrassing, but because I thought it was irrelevant.
Is there some way for moderators or admins to identify the content of a deleted comment? If so, I give my permission for them to do so and state publicly what it contained.
I have been in this community for over ten years.
This latest comment of yours is utterly disgraceful and contemptible by any reasonable standard. Purely an attempt to humiliate me, and on an entirely speculative basis. So much for “letting bygones be bygones”, eh?
So we agree to disagree.
EDIT: I wanted to say it was an interesting discussion to be polite, but the juvenile insults and mud slinging tactics are obvious enough that probably zero passing readers would believe it.
I mean, they probably shouldn’t? When I write a blog post, it’s because I selfishly had something I wanted to say. Obviously, I understand that people who think it’s boring aren’t going to read it! Not everyone needs to read every blog post! That’s why we have a karma system, to help people make prioritization decisions about what to read.
I thought people were supposed to care because you were highlighting systematic political distortions in the rationalist community?
I didn’t mention that part in my other comment because Villiam seemed confused about the inner part of the conflict whereas this seemed like the outer part of the conflict.
I mean, yes, people who care about this alleged “rationalist community” thing might be interested in information about it being biased (and I wrote this post with such readers in mind), but if someone is completely uninterested in the “rationalist community” and is only on this website because they followed a link to an article about information theory, I’d say that’s a pretty good life decision!
They might be interested in information presented in a concise, high signal way.
The way you’ve presented it practically guarantees that nearly every passing reader will not.
i.e. The average reader ‘might be interested’ only to an average degree.