I think you are being unreasonable. I mean, really unreasonable.
First, let’s look at the original exchange. Chris says “I think your definition isn’t quite right and X would be an improvement”. Zvi says “You might be right, but I think one can do still better; I’ll think about it and am open to suggestions”. And you say: That’s a fully general counterargument; Zvi should immediately have rewritten his article to use Chris’s proposed definition, and not doing so shows that he is engaging in motivated skepticism and not offering his true rejection.
Sorry, but that’s just silly. Rewriting the article in line with a slightly modified definition would be a pile of work; if Zvi thinks the slightly modified definition is neither a huge improvement nor the best one can do, it is absolutely reasonable for him to look and see if something better can be found. (In your more recent comment you say “I did not consider switching costs”. OK then: so you didn’t consider the obviously most important factor here but were still happy to leap from “Zvi didn’t do so-and-so” to “Zvi is being a motivated skeptic, hiding his true rejection, etc., etc.”. What the hell?)
Even if in fact nothing better can be found, it is absolutely not reasonable to expect that every time A finds a suboptimality in something B has written B should do anything more than acknowledge it. Does Chris’s refinement of Zvi’s definition invalidate everything Zvi wrote? It doesn’t seem like it. So if Zvi’s article was useful before, it’s still useful now. Leaving it as it is, with one prominent comment describing that refinement and an agreement from Zvi right there under it, will do just fine.
And what’s this “fully general counterargument” business? First of all, Zvi wasn’t making a counterargument (nor purporting to make one). He agreed with what Chris said, after all. It would be a counterargument if Chris had added something like ”… so you should rewrite your article to use my revised definition”, but he didn’t so it isn’t. Second, being “fully general” doesn’t make things wrong, it makes them incomplete. There’s nothing wrong with saying “You say X. I disagree.” even though “I disagree” is a thing anyone can say about anything. It can provide useful context for an actual argument that follows; it can simply be a statement of the speaker’s position, when providing that information is worth the small effort it takes but engaging in a detailed explanation of why isn’t worth the much larger effort that takes; move it one step closer to what Zvi wrote (“You say X. I disagree, but I don’t have my reasons perfectly straight in my mind yet”) and it’s a placeholder for a later more detailed explanation. Nothing wrong with any of that.
Your most recent comment says a thing or two about correspondence bias, so I’d like to draw your attention to what I find a striking feature of both of your replies to Zvi in this thread: you shift very rapidly from observing a particular (alleged) defect in what he wrote to speculating about how he’s thinking badly. So you go straight from “this is a fully general counterargument” to guessing at particular kinds of bias that might be in Zvi’s head. He’s a motivated skeptic! He isn’t giving his true rejection! And you adopt what seems to me (and I think, from what he says in response, also to Zvi) a needlessly accusatory tone.
You could e.g. just have written this: “What do you find still unsatisfactory about Chris’s proposed refinement of your definition, and what are you looking for in suggestions for further improvements? What would it take to justify revising the article to use a better definition?”. That would have done the same job of soliciting more explicit criteria from Zvi. If you were extra-anxious to point out the logical defect you think you see in what he wrote: “That seems like something one could say to any proposed improvement. What do you find still unsatisfactory [etc.]”. What advantage do you see in the much more confrontational approach you took?
(Your recent comment suggests that the answer is something like “By saying such things I hope to make people examine their biases and reduce them”. Take a look at what’s actually happening here. Does it seem like that’s working well?)
So much for the original exchange. Now let’s look at your more recent comment. It doubles down on the accusatory, confrontational approach. It takes Zvi’s statement that (despite the disapproval he expresses) he isn’t downvoting your comment, and casts it as a “threat to downvote”, which makes no sense to me at all: downvoting a single comment is not an action major enough to be worth threatening, and Zvi’s whole point is that he isn’t doing it. I think you may have misconstrued his reason for saying what he said, which (I am guessing, on the basis that it’s what I have meant when I’ve said similar things in the past) is not at all “I didn’t downvote you, but I could and you’d better watch out in case I do, bwahahahaa” but “I know I’m saying something negative about what you wrote, and you may suspect I’ve downvoted you and feel that as a hostile action; but in fact I haven’t downvoted you and I’d like you to know that in the hope that it will help our interactions be friendlier than they otherwise might be”.
Similarly for the bit about the Sunshine Regiment; the point here is that there is a general policy on LW2 of being nice to one another when there isn’t a cogent reason, and Zvi’s statement that your comment was needlessly hostile could be taken as a suggestion that you be officially censured for it, and so he wanted to make it clear that he doesn’t want that. (This one is less obviously not-a-concealed-threat, but I am still 95% confident that it was not intended as anything of the sort.)
And then you start talking about how it would break your heart if you got censured somehow for being needlessly confrontational, and how Less Wrong is your garden. This attempt to tug at your readers’ heartstrings looks extremely odd alongside the no-fuzziness-allowed demands you’ve been making of Zvi. (Not because there’s anything wrong with feeling strongly about things, of course. But because “if you do X it will make me sad” is generally an even worse counterargument to X than Zvi’s allegedly fully general “I think one can do better than X”.)
Take a look at what you’ve written to Zvi in this thread. Look in particular at all the things that (1) refer explicitly to “opponents” and “enemies” and (2) make uncomplimentary statements or conjectures about Zvi’s intellect or character. And then, please, ask yourself the following question: This “way [you] internally refer to enemies and opponents”—is it actually leading to good outcomes for you? Because I don’t think it is. In so far as this thread is any guide, I think it’s leading you to adopt an approach to discussion that annoys other people and makes them less, not more, receptive to anything useful you may have to say.
I think you are being unreasonable. I mean, really unreasonable.
First, let’s look at the original exchange. Chris says “I think your definition isn’t quite right and X would be an improvement”. Zvi says “You might be right, but I think one can do still better; I’ll think about it and am open to suggestions”. And you say: That’s a fully general counterargument; Zvi should immediately have rewritten his article to use Chris’s proposed definition, and not doing so shows that he is engaging in motivated skepticism and not offering his true rejection.
Sorry, but that’s just silly. Rewriting the article in line with a slightly modified definition would be a pile of work; if Zvi thinks the slightly modified definition is neither a huge improvement nor the best one can do, it is absolutely reasonable for him to look and see if something better can be found. (In your more recent comment you say “I did not consider switching costs”. OK then: so you didn’t consider the obviously most important factor here but were still happy to leap from “Zvi didn’t do so-and-so” to “Zvi is being a motivated skeptic, hiding his true rejection, etc., etc.”. What the hell?)
Even if in fact nothing better can be found, it is absolutely not reasonable to expect that every time A finds a suboptimality in something B has written B should do anything more than acknowledge it. Does Chris’s refinement of Zvi’s definition invalidate everything Zvi wrote? It doesn’t seem like it. So if Zvi’s article was useful before, it’s still useful now. Leaving it as it is, with one prominent comment describing that refinement and an agreement from Zvi right there under it, will do just fine.
And what’s this “fully general counterargument” business? First of all, Zvi wasn’t making a counterargument (nor purporting to make one). He agreed with what Chris said, after all. It would be a counterargument if Chris had added something like ”… so you should rewrite your article to use my revised definition”, but he didn’t so it isn’t. Second, being “fully general” doesn’t make things wrong, it makes them incomplete. There’s nothing wrong with saying “You say X. I disagree.” even though “I disagree” is a thing anyone can say about anything. It can provide useful context for an actual argument that follows; it can simply be a statement of the speaker’s position, when providing that information is worth the small effort it takes but engaging in a detailed explanation of why isn’t worth the much larger effort that takes; move it one step closer to what Zvi wrote (“You say X. I disagree, but I don’t have my reasons perfectly straight in my mind yet”) and it’s a placeholder for a later more detailed explanation. Nothing wrong with any of that.
Your most recent comment says a thing or two about correspondence bias, so I’d like to draw your attention to what I find a striking feature of both of your replies to Zvi in this thread: you shift very rapidly from observing a particular (alleged) defect in what he wrote to speculating about how he’s thinking badly. So you go straight from “this is a fully general counterargument” to guessing at particular kinds of bias that might be in Zvi’s head. He’s a motivated skeptic! He isn’t giving his true rejection! And you adopt what seems to me (and I think, from what he says in response, also to Zvi) a needlessly accusatory tone.
You could e.g. just have written this: “What do you find still unsatisfactory about Chris’s proposed refinement of your definition, and what are you looking for in suggestions for further improvements? What would it take to justify revising the article to use a better definition?”. That would have done the same job of soliciting more explicit criteria from Zvi. If you were extra-anxious to point out the logical defect you think you see in what he wrote: “That seems like something one could say to any proposed improvement. What do you find still unsatisfactory [etc.]”. What advantage do you see in the much more confrontational approach you took?
(Your recent comment suggests that the answer is something like “By saying such things I hope to make people examine their biases and reduce them”. Take a look at what’s actually happening here. Does it seem like that’s working well?)
So much for the original exchange. Now let’s look at your more recent comment. It doubles down on the accusatory, confrontational approach. It takes Zvi’s statement that (despite the disapproval he expresses) he isn’t downvoting your comment, and casts it as a “threat to downvote”, which makes no sense to me at all: downvoting a single comment is not an action major enough to be worth threatening, and Zvi’s whole point is that he isn’t doing it. I think you may have misconstrued his reason for saying what he said, which (I am guessing, on the basis that it’s what I have meant when I’ve said similar things in the past) is not at all “I didn’t downvote you, but I could and you’d better watch out in case I do, bwahahahaa” but “I know I’m saying something negative about what you wrote, and you may suspect I’ve downvoted you and feel that as a hostile action; but in fact I haven’t downvoted you and I’d like you to know that in the hope that it will help our interactions be friendlier than they otherwise might be”.
Similarly for the bit about the Sunshine Regiment; the point here is that there is a general policy on LW2 of being nice to one another when there isn’t a cogent reason, and Zvi’s statement that your comment was needlessly hostile could be taken as a suggestion that you be officially censured for it, and so he wanted to make it clear that he doesn’t want that. (This one is less obviously not-a-concealed-threat, but I am still 95% confident that it was not intended as anything of the sort.)
And then you start talking about how it would break your heart if you got censured somehow for being needlessly confrontational, and how Less Wrong is your garden. This attempt to tug at your readers’ heartstrings looks extremely odd alongside the no-fuzziness-allowed demands you’ve been making of Zvi. (Not because there’s anything wrong with feeling strongly about things, of course. But because “if you do X it will make me sad” is generally an even worse counterargument to X than Zvi’s allegedly fully general “I think one can do better than X”.)
Take a look at what you’ve written to Zvi in this thread. Look in particular at all the things that (1) refer explicitly to “opponents” and “enemies” and (2) make uncomplimentary statements or conjectures about Zvi’s intellect or character. And then, please, ask yourself the following question: This “way [you] internally refer to enemies and opponents”—is it actually leading to good outcomes for you? Because I don’t think it is. In so far as this thread is any guide, I think it’s leading you to adopt an approach to discussion that annoys other people and makes them less, not more, receptive to anything useful you may have to say.