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zero_call comments on Eight Short Studies On Excuses - Less Wrong
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Comments (224)
I voted up orthonormal, although I did not downvote you. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt re: your niceness-related intentions, and explain:
This is a confrontational phrasing. The use of the second person is aggressive in context, and the aside where you strongly specify which answer you think is right comes off like a status grab ("When you make your choice between these two options, bear strongly in mind that I think this").
The teacher's behavior is the sole determinant of the student's score. Even if you showed that there is some normative reason to speak only in terms of the latter, that wouldn't indicate that the teacher is in fact speaking in those terms. The fact that the teacher should speak about relevant matters doesn't prevent a ramble about a faculty ski trip from last February; why should it prevent a digression to teacherly grading-related habits?
Obliqueness is an epidemic, but you seem to be drawing the line very uncommonly. I would be only a little more surprised if you had chosen to rant about someone expressing an intention to turn on their lawn sprinkler, saying that this is objectionably oblique because what really matters is that the grass will get wet, not that it be delivered by a particular device.
This would be a reasonable thing to say if you were obviously right to people other than yourself, who stubbornly held out in spite of having clearly already lost out of pride or stubbornness or some incomprehensibly arcane reason. You are not obviously right to people other than yourself. That doesn't mean you're wrong; but it means you can't get away with this sentence and sound nice.
This phrase is sneaky. "Less-than-maximally-considered" is probably denotationally true of every piece of natural language humans actually use. But the implication is that it is not just non-maximally considered; but inadequately considered, and as I said above, that's not clear to people other than you. Also, you're implying that people are actively defending the usage of language to which you object, which seems to me a mischaracterization.
Now you are insinuating that disagreement with you constitutes flouting those values, which is insulting and kind of a cheap shot. (I thought you, a regular contributor to Less Wrong, would have more mindfulness and give a measured, polite reply...!)
This is just an attack on orthonormal, whose comment was not particularly objectionable in any way except inasmuch as it attempted to correct you. Am I next? Also, it looks to me like people have made attempts to specify your mistake. If you don't understand them, there are polite ways to ask for clarification. This ain't one of them.
Do you have any reason apart from this incident that Less Wrong is particularly hostile to complaint? Or that disagreements are hard to find here, such that you should have high priors on apparent incommensurate opinions really being fake signaling tools?
First of all, this breakdown is much more "not nice" than anything that komponisto said, in the sense that it is explicitly negative against komopnisto's post. Komponisto wasn't actually explicitly negative.
Secondly, I think it's unfortunate and unjustified for people to cop out of disagreements based on rudeness or "discursive impropriety". Even if you didn't like what you perceived, that doesn't give you the justification to "victory by secession".
That's not what she did. She explicitly declared that she was done with the argument, not that she won it - by standard debating rules, she forfeited.
And whether she updated as much as she should have is her business, not yours.
And she was reporting her feelings and their sources precisely as requested, not setting out to slander anyone.
To be perfectly frank, I would suggest that the entire thread should have been dropped after her original comment, and should be dropped now.
Doesn't that mean your reply now contradicts your own suggestion?
Anyways, I find it really funny how debate takes on this aura of "No one shall pass!" when someone accuses someone else of bad intentions. I believe very, very strongly in the idea that debate should never be summarily ended in this manner. In my experience these claims come as a shield for people who are simply unwilling to think through the ideas. Anyone is free to withdraw, or discontinue, but there is no justification for silencing someone else. Hence I reject your suggestion to "drop this conversation", just on principle, even though I basically know where you're coming from.
Drop this coversation with Alicorn. You can and should continue elsewhere, with other interested parties, and if necessary you should post a wrapup to conclude any dangling threads.
If someone exits a conversation, that is their choice. But on an internet forum, there is no reason that others shouldn't reply to them, or continue to make points in response. They don't have to respond.
So your response to my question, how do I tap out, would be, "You can't! We're going to continue to pound you into the ground, even and especially if you're not defending yourself." ?
I would think that on a site like this, that wouldn't be true; the issue of whether someone is appropriately updating seems like exactly what we should be talking about. Leaving people to their own rituals of cognition while believing them to be flawed is not an act of courtesy here.
Whether or not she sought to slander anyone, she came off as pretty harsh for (what seem like) very trivial things. (At least I can link to this if anyone claims my disputes with Alicorn have been 100% unreasonableness on my part...)
Now, if komponisto's criticized "non-nice" remarks really are offensive to a large group of people, this is important to know -- and it's just as important to know that it's not someone falsely representing that group for personal reasons.
Umm, hang on, she 'forfeited' prior to posting a 500 word reply. I'd say that in the absence of further data it is reasonable to conclude that the forfeit was revoked.
Her reply was not an addition to the previous conversation - it was a meta remark.