but I don’t see anything manipulative or under-false-pretenses about what you’re complaining about here.
He responded to me in a manner that seemed to only suggest an intention of addressing the subject matter of discussion in this post, not an intention of swaying my stance towards him in our private feud, but then in the text I quoted, he explicitly states that his purpose was to sway my stance in that private feud. That’s practically the definition of false pretenses.
You’re falling prey to the halo effect. You are put off by my more disagreeable manner, and so you impute other negative characteristics to me and become blinded to even very blatant abuses from tailcalled towards me. For my part, I am compelled to be very forcefully assertive by tailcalled’s extreme evasiveness.
(And, for what it’s worth, reading this thread I get a much stronger impression of “importing grudges from elsewhere” from you than from tailcalled.)
That’s because you’ve fallen for his manipulation tactics. He literally admitted the false pretenses, stopping only short of actually using that label. His original reply to me was, by his own admission, motivated by the private feud, which means he was the one who imported a grudge from elsewhere, regardless of what vibe you are getting.
And the sole reason I am coming across as more begrudging than he is because he keeps evading the points so I have to keep directing him back towards them, making me appear forceful, which you may remember was precisely what I said would happen if I follow his prescription for defusing these manipulation tactics.
All of that is him manipulating you, and you have fallen for it.
I am not persuaded by any part of your analysis of the situation.
Saying something relevant to an ongoing discussion (which it seems clear to me tailcalled’s original comment was) while also hoping it will be persuasive to someone who has disagreed with you about something else is not “false pretenses”.
It is certainly true that I am put off by your disagreeable manner. I do not think this is the halo effect. Finding unpleasantness unpleasant isn’t the halo/horns effect, it’s just what unpleasantness is; as for any opinions I may form, that’s a matter of reasoning “if Cornelius had good arguments I would expect him to use them; since he evidently prefers to insult people, it is likely that he doesn’t have good arguments”. Of course you might just enjoy being unpleasant for its own sake, in which case indeed I might underestimate the quality of the arguments or evidence you have at your disposal; if you want me (or others who think as I do) not to do that, I suggest that you try actually presenting said arguments and evidence rather than throwing insults around.
It doesn’t look to me as if tailcalled is being evasive; if anything he[1] seems to me to be engaging with the issues rather more than you are. (Maybe he’s being evasive in whatever other venues your Drama is spilling over from; I have no way of knowing about that.) In any case, evasiveness doesn’t compel insults. There is no valid inference from “tailcalled is being evasive” to “I must insult devote a large fraction of what I say to tailcalled to insulting him”.
[1] I actually have no idea of tailcalled’s gender; I’m going along with your choice of pronoun. In the unlikely (but maybe less unlikely in this particular sort of context) event that this is leading my astray, my apologies to tailcalled.
It does not look to me as if your repeated insultingness towards tailcalled is a necessary consequence (or in fact any sort of consequence) of having to keep pulling the conversation back to something he is avoiding talking about. (I’m not sure what it is that you think he is avoiding talking about. Maybe it’s How Terrible Tailcalled Is, but in that case I don’t think you get to say “I’m only being insulting to tailcalled because he keeps trying to make the conversation be about something other than how awful he is”.)
Saying something relevant to an ongoing discussion (which it seems clear to me tailcalled’s original comment was) while also hoping it will be persuasive to someone who has disagreed with you about something else is not “false pretenses”.
He specifically wanted to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive, which massively distorts his judgement with respect to commenting on the justice of Zack’s actions and LW’s reception of him. Tailcalled ought to at the very least have disclosed these ulterior motives from the beginning.
An additional point to note is that after more than a decade of efforts to mend the relationship, I gave up and cut off contact with tailcalled. I had however given him the opportunity to reach out to me with a view to make amends, or otherwise to convince me that I had been wrong to cut him off. He exploited this offer and chose not to do either, and for some reason I went along with it, causing the past several months to have been a lot more torturous than they needed to be, but it was somewhat bearable because it was confined to that one email conversation.
Then he interacts with me here, not only to address the topic of Zack’s post, but specifically to pursue his feud with me outside of emails.
It is certainly true that I am put off by your disagreeable manner. I do not think this is the halo effect.
That’s not what I said. It’s your being put off by my disagreeable manner that makes you subject to the halo effect when it comes to tailcalled’s responses.
as for any opinions I may form, that’s a matter of reasoning “if Cornelius had good arguments I would expect him to use them; since he evidently prefers to insult people, it is likely that he doesn’t have good arguments”
But the things you deemed insults were actually critiques of his character, not mere insults, and most of those critiques were aimed at showing that he is being unjust towards Zack, with the few exceptions pointing out character flaws that are characteristic of many LessWrongers and not just him. It is simply not possible to argue in favour of my position without raising points of personal criticism, because those points of criticism are absolutely central to my position, and it is only the horns effect that makes you perceive them as mere insults.
Of course you might just enjoy being unpleasant for its own sake
No, I do not. I actually have quite a distaste for it, but when faced with an immensely abusive community such as this one, my only other means of defence is to plead for mercy, which is errosive to self esteem.
But in this case, since I am dealing with tailcalled in particular, even that would not work. I have learned from about more than a decade of abuse from him that this is the only viable defence. Problem is, if he is in a crowd of enablers who don’t notice his bs because they are used to engaging in milder forms of the same abusive behaviour, then it will paint me as the abusive one.
It doesn’t look to me as if tailcalled is being evasive; if anything he[1] seems to me to be engaging with the issues rather more than you are.
No, this is simply him having evaded my arguments for so long that he has managed to distort your impression of what is actually being discussed. The main issue is a critique of the rationalist community. That then led to an issue of tailcalled’s injustice in judging the feud, and that in turn led to an issue of his evading my points.
If you trace back the lines of argumentation where I seem to be insulting him, you will find that what you deem insults are mostly accusations of injustice that were centrally relevant to the argument. Then, by endless nitpicking and evasiveness, and my insistence on maintaining the accusations of injustice through this obfuscation, they became increasingly separated from their original context, and you quite simply lost track of why I made them in the first place.
There are however also a few of them (edit: namely, the ones about self-serving bias) that only make sense in context of the private feud, and which are in response to remarks of his (eg. about the critical theory) that only look cruel if seen in context, which sorta illustrates what I mean about the false pretenses, because if he had disclosed them from the beginning, I would not have engaged at all.
Edit: I am also suspicious that he might have taken it here in part to present the feud in front of a crowd, with zero context, and specifically a crowd that is part of his culture and is likely to agree with him based on surface appearances, setting up false appearances of unanimity.
*edit: removed a fact that could be used to personally identify tailcalled
Well, maybe I’m confused about what tailcalled’s “original comment” that you’re complaining about was, because looking at what I thought it was I can’t see anything in it that anyone could possibly expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are abusive. Nor much that anyone could expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are wrong, which makes me suspect even more that I’ve failed to identify what comment we’re talking about. But the only other plausible candidate I see for the “original comment” is this one, which has even less of that sort. Or maybe this one, which again doesn’t have anything like that. What comment do you think we are talking about here?
I am fairly sure my opinions of tailcalled’s responses here is very similar to my opinion of his comments elsewhere which haven’t (so far as I’ve noticed) involved you at all, so I don’t find it very plausible that those opinions are greatly affected by the fact that on this occasion he is arguing with someone I’m finding disagreeable.
“Pointing out character flaws”. “Insults”. Po-TAY-to. Po-TAH-to. My complaint isn’t that the way in which you are pointing out tailcalled’s alleged character flaws is needlessly unpleasant, it’s that you’re doing it at all. (And I would say the same if tailcalled were spending all his time pointing out your alleged character flaws, whatever those might be, but he isn’t.) As far as I am concerned, when an LW discussion becomes mostly about the character of one of its participants, it is very unlikely that it is doing any good to anyone. And if what you mostly want to do here is point out people’s character flaws, then even if those character flaws are real I think it’s probably not very helpful.
It doesn’t look to me as if LW is the hotbed of “constant abuse” you are trying to portray it as (and no, I’m not trying to insist that “constant” has to mean “literally nonstop” or anything). It looks to me—and here I’m going off my own impression, not e.g. anything tailcalled may have said about the situation—as if Zack gets plenty of disagreement on LW but very little abuse. So to whatever extent your “accusations of injustice” are of the form “tailcalled denies that Zack is constantly being abused, but he is”, I find myself agreeing with tailcalled more than with you. Again, this was already my impression, so it can’t be a halo/horns thing from this conversation.
(Of course, you may have me pigeonholed as one of the “crowd of enablers”. Maybe you’re right, though from my perspective I’m pretty sure I’m not abusing anyone and have no intention or awareness of engaging in the specific catch-22 you describe. I have disagreed with Zack from time to time, though.)
Well, maybe I’m confused about what tailcalled’s “original comment” that you’re complaining about was, because looking at what I thought it was I can’t see anything in it that anyone could possibly expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are abusive. Nor much that anyone could expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are wrong, which makes me suspect even more that I’ve failed to identify what comment we’re talking about. But the only other plausible candidate I see for the “original comment” is this one, which has eve n less of that sort. Or maybe this one, which again doesn’t have anything like that. What comment do you think we are talking about here?
I also don’t see how it was supposed to do that, but I am commenting on his stated intentions. The fact that it is hard to spot those intentions in his first comments, even when actively looking for them, only further corroborates my point that his stated intentions were not obvious at all, and that it seemed to be a relatively innocuous reply that was made with only the discussion in mind. Yet, by his own statements, his point in responding was to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive. Thus, as I said, false pretenses.
I am fairly sure my opinions of tailcalled’s responses here is very similar to my opinion of his comments elsewhere which haven’t (so far as I’ve noticed) involved you at all, so I don’t find it very plausible that those opinions are greatly affected by the fact that on this occasion he is arguing with someone I’m finding disagreeable.
My claim was specifically that the halo effect is blinding you to an evasiveness that he does not typically display. Thus it is wholly consistent with you having a similar opinion of his comments here compared to your usual opinion of his comments.
“Pointing out character flaws”. “Insults”. Po-TAY-to. Po-TAH-to. My complaint isn’t that the way in which you are pointing out tailcalled’s alleged character flaws is needlessly unpleasant, it’s that you’re doing it at all.
I have already addressed that argument, and the whole point of my using the phrase “pointing out character flaws” was to stress the relevance of doing so to the argument I am making.
Ad hominem is not a fallacy if the topic of discussion is literally about the person’s character, and justice when commenting on feuds is after all a character trait. I cannot effectively criticise a community without criticising its members, and I cannot effectively criticise its members without pointing out character flaws, ie. without “insulting” them as you put it. If I had to adhere to your standards, my position would be ruled out before I even had a chance to make my case.
My stated intention wasn’t to convince you that Blanchardians are abusive. My stated intention was to “point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive”. The information in my comment is supposed to lie in the exact areas I point to, not in Blanchardians being bad.
You’ve decided that I am actually terribly misjudging these areas due to bias and so my opinions on them are derailing the conversation. You’re entitled to have that opinion, but I disagree, and therefore endlessly insulting my intellect while not engaging with my core point is not going to be convincing to me.
I don’t know how to inform you about these points other than to just keep hold of it while you try to turn LessWrong against me.
Of course this sort of mirrors the situation in the emails where you acted like I had converted to some insane blank-slatism even though I told you that wasn’t the case and my crux was more closely related to Blanchardianism.
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.
He responded to me in a manner that seemed to only suggest an intention of addressing the subject matter of discussion in this post, not an intention of swaying my stance towards him in our private feud, but then in the text I quoted, he explicitly states that his purpose was to sway my stance in that private feud. That’s practically the definition of false pretenses.
You’re falling prey to the halo effect. You are put off by my more disagreeable manner, and so you impute other negative characteristics to me and become blinded to even very blatant abuses from tailcalled towards me. For my part, I am compelled to be very forcefully assertive by tailcalled’s extreme evasiveness.
That’s because you’ve fallen for his manipulation tactics. He literally admitted the false pretenses, stopping only short of actually using that label. His original reply to me was, by his own admission, motivated by the private feud, which means he was the one who imported a grudge from elsewhere, regardless of what vibe you are getting.
And the sole reason I am coming across as more begrudging than he is because he keeps evading the points so I have to keep directing him back towards them, making me appear forceful, which you may remember was precisely what I said would happen if I follow his prescription for defusing these manipulation tactics.
All of that is him manipulating you, and you have fallen for it.
I am not persuaded by any part of your analysis of the situation.
Saying something relevant to an ongoing discussion (which it seems clear to me tailcalled’s original comment was) while also hoping it will be persuasive to someone who has disagreed with you about something else is not “false pretenses”.
It is certainly true that I am put off by your disagreeable manner. I do not think this is the halo effect. Finding unpleasantness unpleasant isn’t the halo/horns effect, it’s just what unpleasantness is; as for any opinions I may form, that’s a matter of reasoning “if Cornelius had good arguments I would expect him to use them; since he evidently prefers to insult people, it is likely that he doesn’t have good arguments”. Of course you might just enjoy being unpleasant for its own sake, in which case indeed I might underestimate the quality of the arguments or evidence you have at your disposal; if you want me (or others who think as I do) not to do that, I suggest that you try actually presenting said arguments and evidence rather than throwing insults around.
It doesn’t look to me as if tailcalled is being evasive; if anything he[1] seems to me to be engaging with the issues rather more than you are. (Maybe he’s being evasive in whatever other venues your Drama is spilling over from; I have no way of knowing about that.) In any case, evasiveness doesn’t compel insults. There is no valid inference from “tailcalled is being evasive” to “I must insult devote a large fraction of what I say to tailcalled to insulting him”.
[1] I actually have no idea of tailcalled’s gender; I’m going along with your choice of pronoun. In the unlikely (but maybe less unlikely in this particular sort of context) event that this is leading my astray, my apologies to tailcalled.
It does not look to me as if your repeated insultingness towards tailcalled is a necessary consequence (or in fact any sort of consequence) of having to keep pulling the conversation back to something he is avoiding talking about. (I’m not sure what it is that you think he is avoiding talking about. Maybe it’s How Terrible Tailcalled Is, but in that case I don’t think you get to say “I’m only being insulting to tailcalled because he keeps trying to make the conversation be about something other than how awful he is”.)
He specifically wanted to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive, which massively distorts his judgement with respect to commenting on the justice of Zack’s actions and LW’s reception of him. Tailcalled ought to at the very least have disclosed these ulterior motives from the beginning.
An additional point to note is that after more than a decade of efforts to mend the relationship, I gave up and cut off contact with tailcalled. I had however given him the opportunity to reach out to me with a view to make amends, or otherwise to convince me that I had been wrong to cut him off. He exploited this offer and chose not to do either, and for some reason I went along with it, causing the past several months to have been a lot more torturous than they needed to be, but it was somewhat bearable because it was confined to that one email conversation.
Then he interacts with me here, not only to address the topic of Zack’s post, but specifically to pursue his feud with me outside of emails.
That’s not what I said. It’s your being put off by my disagreeable manner that makes you subject to the halo effect when it comes to tailcalled’s responses.
But the things you deemed insults were actually critiques of his character, not mere insults, and most of those critiques were aimed at showing that he is being unjust towards Zack, with the few exceptions pointing out character flaws that are characteristic of many LessWrongers and not just him. It is simply not possible to argue in favour of my position without raising points of personal criticism, because those points of criticism are absolutely central to my position, and it is only the horns effect that makes you perceive them as mere insults.
No, I do not. I actually have quite a distaste for it, but when faced with an immensely abusive community such as this one, my only other means of defence is to plead for mercy, which is errosive to self esteem.
But in this case, since I am dealing with tailcalled in particular, even that would not work. I have learned from about more than a decade of abuse from him that this is the only viable defence. Problem is, if he is in a crowd of enablers who don’t notice his bs because they are used to engaging in milder forms of the same abusive behaviour, then it will paint me as the abusive one.
No, this is simply him having evaded my arguments for so long that he has managed to distort your impression of what is actually being discussed. The main issue is a critique of the rationalist community. That then led to an issue of tailcalled’s injustice in judging the feud, and that in turn led to an issue of his evading my points.
If you trace back the lines of argumentation where I seem to be insulting him, you will find that what you deem insults are mostly accusations of injustice that were centrally relevant to the argument. Then, by endless nitpicking and evasiveness, and my insistence on maintaining the accusations of injustice through this obfuscation, they became increasingly separated from their original context, and you quite simply lost track of why I made them in the first place.
There are however also a few of them (edit: namely, the ones about self-serving bias) that only make sense in context of the private feud, and which are in response to remarks of his (eg. about the critical theory) that only look cruel if seen in context, which sorta illustrates what I mean about the false pretenses, because if he had disclosed them from the beginning, I would not have engaged at all.
Edit: I am also suspicious that he might have taken it here in part to present the feud in front of a crowd, with zero context, and specifically a crowd that is part of his culture and is likely to agree with him based on surface appearances, setting up false appearances of unanimity.
*edit: removed a fact that could be used to personally identify tailcalled
Well, maybe I’m confused about what tailcalled’s “original comment” that you’re complaining about was, because looking at what I thought it was I can’t see anything in it that anyone could possibly expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are abusive. Nor much that anyone could expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are wrong, which makes me suspect even more that I’ve failed to identify what comment we’re talking about. But the only other plausible candidate I see for the “original comment” is this one, which has even less of that sort. Or maybe this one, which again doesn’t have anything like that. What comment do you think we are talking about here?
I am fairly sure my opinions of tailcalled’s responses here is very similar to my opinion of his comments elsewhere which haven’t (so far as I’ve noticed) involved you at all, so I don’t find it very plausible that those opinions are greatly affected by the fact that on this occasion he is arguing with someone I’m finding disagreeable.
“Pointing out character flaws”. “Insults”. Po-TAY-to. Po-TAH-to. My complaint isn’t that the way in which you are pointing out tailcalled’s alleged character flaws is needlessly unpleasant, it’s that you’re doing it at all. (And I would say the same if tailcalled were spending all his time pointing out your alleged character flaws, whatever those might be, but he isn’t.) As far as I am concerned, when an LW discussion becomes mostly about the character of one of its participants, it is very unlikely that it is doing any good to anyone. And if what you mostly want to do here is point out people’s character flaws, then even if those character flaws are real I think it’s probably not very helpful.
It doesn’t look to me as if LW is the hotbed of “constant abuse” you are trying to portray it as (and no, I’m not trying to insist that “constant” has to mean “literally nonstop” or anything). It looks to me—and here I’m going off my own impression, not e.g. anything tailcalled may have said about the situation—as if Zack gets plenty of disagreement on LW but very little abuse. So to whatever extent your “accusations of injustice” are of the form “tailcalled denies that Zack is constantly being abused, but he is”, I find myself agreeing with tailcalled more than with you. Again, this was already my impression, so it can’t be a halo/horns thing from this conversation.
(Of course, you may have me pigeonholed as one of the “crowd of enablers”. Maybe you’re right, though from my perspective I’m pretty sure I’m not abusing anyone and have no intention or awareness of engaging in the specific catch-22 you describe. I have disagreed with Zack from time to time, though.)
I also don’t see how it was supposed to do that, but I am commenting on his stated intentions. The fact that it is hard to spot those intentions in his first comments, even when actively looking for them, only further corroborates my point that his stated intentions were not obvious at all, and that it seemed to be a relatively innocuous reply that was made with only the discussion in mind. Yet, by his own statements, his point in responding was to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive. Thus, as I said, false pretenses.
My claim was specifically that the halo effect is blinding you to an evasiveness that he does not typically display. Thus it is wholly consistent with you having a similar opinion of his comments here compared to your usual opinion of his comments.
I have already addressed that argument, and the whole point of my using the phrase “pointing out character flaws” was to stress the relevance of doing so to the argument I am making.
Ad hominem is not a fallacy if the topic of discussion is literally about the person’s character, and justice when commenting on feuds is after all a character trait. I cannot effectively criticise a community without criticising its members, and I cannot effectively criticise its members without pointing out character flaws, ie. without “insulting” them as you put it. If I had to adhere to your standards, my position would be ruled out before I even had a chance to make my case.
My stated intention wasn’t to convince you that Blanchardians are abusive. My stated intention was to “point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive”. The information in my comment is supposed to lie in the exact areas I point to, not in Blanchardians being bad.
You’ve decided that I am actually terribly misjudging these areas due to bias and so my opinions on them are derailing the conversation. You’re entitled to have that opinion, but I disagree, and therefore endlessly insulting my intellect while not engaging with my core point is not going to be convincing to me.
I don’t know how to inform you about these points other than to just keep hold of it while you try to turn LessWrong against me.
Of course this sort of mirrors the situation in the emails where you acted like I had converted to some insane blank-slatism even though I told you that wasn’t the case and my crux was more closely related to Blanchardianism.
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.
We can take the discussion to emails to avoid crowd pressure.