I am deeply unconvinced by the argument “Some time after writing X, tailcalled said he said it partly to do Y; it’s very unclear how X could possibly do Y; therefore when tailcalled wrote X he did it under false pretenses”. It certainly does seem to follow from those premises that tailcalled’s account of why he did X isn’t quite right. But that doesn’t mean that when he wrote X there was anything dishonest going on. I actually think the most likely thing is that he didn’t in fact write X in order to do Y, he just had a vague notion in his mind that maybe the discussion would have effect Y, and forgot that he hadn’t so far got round to saying anything that was likely to do it. Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence.
(Not very much incompetence. This sort of discussion is easy to lose track of.)
And, again, it is not “false pretenses” to engage in a discussion with more than one goal in mind and not explicitly lay out all one’s goals in advance.
an evasiveness that he does not typically display
Oh. I’d thought you were mostly alleging persistent character flaws rather than one-off things. Anyway: I won’t say it’s impossible that what you say is true, but I am so far unconvinced.
I cannot effectively criticise a community without criticising its members
Perhaps I have been unclear about what it is I think you have been doing in this thread that it would be better not to do. I am not objecting to criticizing people’s behaviour. (I think I disagree with many of your criticisms, but that’s a separate matter.) What I think is both rude and counterproductive is focusing on what sort of person the other person is, as opposed to what they have done and are doing. In this particular thread the rot begins with “thus flattering your narcissism”—I don’t agree with all your previous criticism of tailcalled but it all has the form “you did X, which was bad because Y”, which I think is fine; but at this point you switch to “and you are a bad person”. And then we get “you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it” and “your few genuine displays of good faith” and “goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate” and “you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting” and so forth.
I think this sort of comment is basically never helpful. If what you are trying to do here is something that can’t be done without this sort of comment, then I think it would be better not to do it . (More precisely: if you think that what you are trying to do here is something that can’t be done without such comments, then I think you are probably wrong unless what you are trying to do is mostly “make tailcalled feel bad” or something.)
I did in fact do X in order to do Y. The proof, which only @Cornelius Dybdahl can see, is that “which in turn makes it challenging to make sensible descriptions like “biological sex is binary because chromosomes are binary, XX vs XY”″ is a reference to something he said in the emails.
The issue is that he is misrepresenting what Y is. Y is not proving that Blanchardians are abusive. Y is highlighting a problem with Blanchardian rhetoric, which Zack arguably does more than the run-of-the-mill TERF that Cornelius said he already knew was abusive.
And, again, it is not “false pretenses” to engage in a discussion with more than one goal in mind and not explicitly lay out all one’s goals in advance.
It saddens me that LessWrong has reached such a state that it is now a widespread behaviour to straw man the hell out of someone’s position and then double down when called on it.
What I think is both rude and counterproductive is focusing on what sort of person the other person is, as opposed to what they have done and are doing. In this particular thread the rot begins with “thus flattering your narcissism”
But the problem is at the level of his character, not any given behaviour. I have already explained this in one of my replies to tailcalled; if he simply learns to stay away from one type of narcissistic community, he will still be drawn in by communities where narcissism manifests in other ways than the one he is “immunized” to, so to speak. Likewise with the concrete behaviours: if he learns to avoid some toxic behaviours, the underlying toxicity will simply manifest in other toxic behaviours. I do not say there is therefore no point in calling out the toxic behaviours, but the only point in doing that is to use them as pointers to the underlying problem. If I just get him to recognise a particular pattern of behaviour, then I will have misidentified the pattern to him and might as well have done nothing. The issue is specifically that he is a horrible person and needs to realise it so he can begin practising virtue — this being of course a moral philosophy that LessWrongers are generally averse to, but you can see the result.
And then we get “you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it” and “your few genuine displays of good faith” and “goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate” and “you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting” and so forth.
All of these are criticising behaviours rather than character and thus fit your pretended criterion. Thus, you made no specific complaint about them, because what you actually take issue with is simply my harshness and directness.
I think this sort of comment is basically never helpful
It is the only thing that is ever helpful when an improvement to the underlying character is what is called for.
(LessWrong mod here. I am very far from having read remotely all discussion on this post, and am unlikely to because this is a truly giant pile of text. FWIW, this comment seems quite aggressive to me standing on its own, and my best guess, using really just surface-level heuristics and not having engaged in much depth, is that this conversation seems not particularly productive and if I was a participant I would probably do something else.
Also, please don’t generalize LW norms from a comment thread as niche and deep as this one. I highly doubt any of the mods have followed this discussion all the way to the end, and I doubt the voting here corresponds to anything but the strong feelings of a relatively small number of discussion participants.
All this is just speaking as someone who has skimmed this thread. I might totally be misreading things. I don’t think I am going to stop anyone from commenting here unless someone wants me to call for more official moderator action.)
I am not (deliberately or knowingly) strawmanning anything, and what you call “doubling down” I call “not having been convinced by your arguments”. If you think tailcalled was doing something more heinous than (1) having purposes other than advancing the discussion here and (2) not going out of his way to say so, then maybe you should actually indicate what that was; your accounts of his alleged dishonesty, so far, look to me like (1) + (2) + your disapproval, rather than (1) + (2) + something actually worse than 1+2.
If “the problem is at the level of his character” then I do not think there is any realistic chance that complaining about his character will do anything to solve the problem.
Have you ever seen any case where a substantial improvement to someone’s character came about as a result of someone telling them on an internet forum what a bad person they were? I don’t think I have.
At this point I shall take habryka’s advice and drop this discussion. (Not only because of habryka’s advice but because I agree with him that this conversation seems unlikely to be very productive, and because the LW user interface—deliberately—makes it painful to take part in discussions downthread of highly-downvoted comments.) I will not be offended if you choose to get in the last word.
I am deeply unconvinced by the argument “Some time after writing X, tailcalled said he said it partly to do Y; it’s very unclear how X could possibly do Y; therefore when tailcalled wrote X he did it under false pretenses”. It certainly does seem to follow from those premises that tailcalled’s account of why he did X isn’t quite right. But that doesn’t mean that when he wrote X there was anything dishonest going on. I actually think the most likely thing is that he didn’t in fact write X in order to do Y, he just had a vague notion in his mind that maybe the discussion would have effect Y, and forgot that he hadn’t so far got round to saying anything that was likely to do it. Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence.
(Not very much incompetence. This sort of discussion is easy to lose track of.)
And, again, it is not “false pretenses” to engage in a discussion with more than one goal in mind and not explicitly lay out all one’s goals in advance.
Oh. I’d thought you were mostly alleging persistent character flaws rather than one-off things. Anyway: I won’t say it’s impossible that what you say is true, but I am so far unconvinced.
Perhaps I have been unclear about what it is I think you have been doing in this thread that it would be better not to do. I am not objecting to criticizing people’s behaviour. (I think I disagree with many of your criticisms, but that’s a separate matter.) What I think is both rude and counterproductive is focusing on what sort of person the other person is, as opposed to what they have done and are doing. In this particular thread the rot begins with “thus flattering your narcissism”—I don’t agree with all your previous criticism of tailcalled but it all has the form “you did X, which was bad because Y”, which I think is fine; but at this point you switch to “and you are a bad person”. And then we get “you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it” and “your few genuine displays of good faith” and “goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate” and “you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting” and so forth.
I think this sort of comment is basically never helpful. If what you are trying to do here is something that can’t be done without this sort of comment, then I think it would be better not to do it . (More precisely: if you think that what you are trying to do here is something that can’t be done without such comments, then I think you are probably wrong unless what you are trying to do is mostly “make tailcalled feel bad” or something.)
I did in fact do X in order to do Y. The proof, which only @Cornelius Dybdahl can see, is that “which in turn makes it challenging to make sensible descriptions like “biological sex is binary because chromosomes are binary, XX vs XY”″ is a reference to something he said in the emails.
The issue is that he is misrepresenting what Y is. Y is not proving that Blanchardians are abusive. Y is highlighting a problem with Blanchardian rhetoric, which Zack arguably does more than the run-of-the-mill TERF that Cornelius said he already knew was abusive.
It saddens me that LessWrong has reached such a state that it is now a widespread behaviour to straw man the hell out of someone’s position and then double down when called on it.
But the problem is at the level of his character, not any given behaviour. I have already explained this in one of my replies to tailcalled; if he simply learns to stay away from one type of narcissistic community, he will still be drawn in by communities where narcissism manifests in other ways than the one he is “immunized” to, so to speak. Likewise with the concrete behaviours: if he learns to avoid some toxic behaviours, the underlying toxicity will simply manifest in other toxic behaviours. I do not say there is therefore no point in calling out the toxic behaviours, but the only point in doing that is to use them as pointers to the underlying problem. If I just get him to recognise a particular pattern of behaviour, then I will have misidentified the pattern to him and might as well have done nothing. The issue is specifically that he is a horrible person and needs to realise it so he can begin practising virtue — this being of course a moral philosophy that LessWrongers are generally averse to, but you can see the result.
All of these are criticising behaviours rather than character and thus fit your pretended criterion. Thus, you made no specific complaint about them, because what you actually take issue with is simply my harshness and directness.
It is the only thing that is ever helpful when an improvement to the underlying character is what is called for.
(LessWrong mod here. I am very far from having read remotely all discussion on this post, and am unlikely to because this is a truly giant pile of text. FWIW, this comment seems quite aggressive to me standing on its own, and my best guess, using really just surface-level heuristics and not having engaged in much depth, is that this conversation seems not particularly productive and if I was a participant I would probably do something else.
Also, please don’t generalize LW norms from a comment thread as niche and deep as this one. I highly doubt any of the mods have followed this discussion all the way to the end, and I doubt the voting here corresponds to anything but the strong feelings of a relatively small number of discussion participants.
All this is just speaking as someone who has skimmed this thread. I might totally be misreading things. I don’t think I am going to stop anyone from commenting here unless someone wants me to call for more official moderator action.)
I am not (deliberately or knowingly) strawmanning anything, and what you call “doubling down” I call “not having been convinced by your arguments”. If you think tailcalled was doing something more heinous than (1) having purposes other than advancing the discussion here and (2) not going out of his way to say so, then maybe you should actually indicate what that was; your accounts of his alleged dishonesty, so far, look to me like (1) + (2) + your disapproval, rather than (1) + (2) + something actually worse than 1+2.
If “the problem is at the level of his character” then I do not think there is any realistic chance that complaining about his character will do anything to solve the problem.
Have you ever seen any case where a substantial improvement to someone’s character came about as a result of someone telling them on an internet forum what a bad person they were? I don’t think I have.
At this point I shall take habryka’s advice and drop this discussion. (Not only because of habryka’s advice but because I agree with him that this conversation seems unlikely to be very productive, and because the LW user interface—deliberately—makes it painful to take part in discussions downthread of highly-downvoted comments.) I will not be offended if you choose to get in the last word.