Do you get why demonstrating (2) shows why someone giving advice on (1) should, for consistency, have applied (1)? And therefore why (2) is relevant?

If you do get the distinction, do you recognize that Alicorn's OP is entirely about (1), while your criticisms are entirely about (2)?

From the very first sentence the underlying premise supporting that 'how' is that the author can, in fact, do the thing in question. It isn't presented as something known in theory, were that the case external evidence would be required, not implicit reference to personal experience. This being the case either a demonstrated strength in the area or a description of specific improvement in a weakness is required to give support to the 'how to guide' in question.

(The above is independent of whether Alicorn is hypocritical or otherwise a worthy subject of moral sanction. It is just a rejection of the claim of Tyrrell's that observations of the poster is 'entirely' irrelevant to the credibility of the advice given. With extra rejection given to the condescending tone.)

She wrote an article about how to go about intentionally liking someone. The fact that she's chosen not to intentionally like you is not evidence that she is incapable of doing so in other cases, nor that the advice may not be useful to others.

Isn't Alicorn choosing not to try to like him based on an existing negative impression of him? In other word, she has decided not to try to like him... because she doesn't like him in the first place...? Isn't this exactly the kind of error that her post warns against? [Edit: I retract this particular paragraph for making assumptions about Alicorn's motives that I can't verify.]

I wonder if the whole breakdown between the two could have been minimized if Alicorn (and Silas) had been applying the type of strategies she mentions in the post from the start. She did mention avoiding the fundamental attribution error (emphasis mine):

When the person exhibits a characteristic, habit, or tendency you have on your list (or, probably just to aggravate you, turns out to have a new one), be on your guard immediately for the fundamental attribution error. It is especially insidious when you already dislike the person, and so it's important to compensate consciously and directly for its influence. Elevate to conscious thought an "attribution story", in which you consider a circumstance - not a character trait - which would explain this most recent example of bad behavior.

In this case, there actually is a relevant circumstance (which I attempt to recount ): Alicorn was kind of a jerk to him in both intellectual and personal ways without any retraction or apology. He followed her around being increasingly sarcastic, and she wrote him off as a jerk, resulting in him becoming even more abrasive. [Edit: This is my perception as an observer with (a) significant agreement with Silas on substantive issues, (b) significant disagreement with Silas' communication style, and (c) significant disagreement with Alicorn on certain issues.]

Alicorn doesn't seem to have acknowledged the circumstance in which Silas was being abrasive and sarcastic towards her. People recently seeing their exchanges won't know the circumstance, either. As a result, his comments may read as more hostile to them, when to me many of them read like frustration at being treated unfairly by someone and then being made into the bad guy when attempting to seek redress with them. Yes, many of his comments sound flat-out hostile to me, too (and I've told Silas in the past to tone it down), but these mainly started appearing after communication between the two of them had broken down, which seems a lot due to communication errors on Alicorn's end, also.

When judging how much of a jerk someone is and deciding whether it's worth trying to like them, it's probably an example of the fundamental attribution error to judge them a jerk for being consistently sarcastic to you after you were a jerk to them and didn't apologize. Alicorn's assessment of Silas seems, to a large degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy (which also implies that there is a degree to which Silas' sarcasm level isn't justified by the way Alicorn treated him... though I do have sympathy for him for reasons I explain below).

Now, normally, I wouldn't feel motivated to point a contradiction I perceived between a top-level post, and the behavior of a poster. I tend to treat people's arguments in isolation. However, I'm not in Silas' shoes. I know that I would feel frustrated and helpless if I was treated unfairly by a higher status member of a community, and then notice that person receiving acclaim from the community for advocating virtues that seemed absent in their treatment of me. I would start to feel a bit bullied if, when I had tried to point out the contradiction at various points and seek some updating from the high status person, members of the community sided with the high status person, rather than with me. I hope I would be able to just get over it, or communicate my frustration in a constructive way that put people on my side.

I have a decent level of social support, so I can handle someone giving me poor advice that is ignorant of my experience. I can handle people telling me something like what Alicorn told Silas (see my first link): that my female friends must not like me very much because they aren't introducing me to more women. I could even handle someone saying: "If you'd like to add a less polite data point, I'd neither date you nor introduce you to my single friends based on what little I know of you" (Alicorn's words to Silas, which were not justified by anything he had said at that point).

To me, I can shrug these things off; they aren't a big deal... because I have social support. But it's important to realize that to someone who has a below average level of social support, such presumptions are a big deal. People, including me, kept telling Silas to "get over" his issues with Alicorn, but perhaps what she said might have been disproportionately hurtful or angering to him than it would have been to any of us, and consequently harder to just "get over." Silas still should have followed our advice, but our judgments of him based on the fact that he didn't must take this potential background into account.

For people with lower social support, being asked to "get over it" can trigger past issues of bullying: being bullied by a more popular bully and then being told that it isn't a big deal, and people judging you as more uncool for making a big deal about it than they judge the bully uncool for originally mistreating you. I am not saying that Alicorn was bullying Silas (though she may owe him some sort of apology or retraction), only presenting a hypothesis that her treatment of him, and our insistence that he "get over it" without any kind of apology or retraction from her, could well trigger a less-than-graceful response from someone with lower than average social support who have suffered interpersonal maltreatment in the past. If Silas belongs to such a class of people, it would explain a lot of the sarcasm and abrasiveness he has been flinging around towards people.

The ability to "just get over" people being a jerk to you and devaluing your social desirability is a privilege of people with social support. Since many of the people here might experience lower-than-average levels of social support, it's a bad precedent on LessWrong if the norms allow someone to be a jerk to someone with a low level of social support, and then write the victim off as a jerk because they get mad and don't respond as gracefully as someone with high social support would. It's also a bad norm to allow poster A to be a jerk to poster B, and then accept that poster A can demand that poster B stop replying to them after poster B acts like a jerk in return.

For various reasons, Alicorn herself may not have realized that Silas felt maligned in that original discussion, or that she owed him an apology/retracion, and perhaps thought the updating she showed towards my explanation of where he was coming from was enough (again, see the first post I link to). As a result, she might have been mystified by why he was consistently being sarcastic to her, and imputed his behavior as a negative reflection of his character, such that he wasn't worth communicating with or even trying to like. [Edit: Although these potential explanations of Alicorn's thought processes are charitable, I acknowledge them as speculation.] This would be an example of the fundamental attribution error, even though it might have been an unknowing one.

here would be a perfectly suitable place to bring up failures of her advice, if such failures actually existed.

Please reconcile your obvious advice with jimrandomh's equally-obvious but opposite advice given here. Specifically, on the issue of whether I should have made a comment in this discussion that implicitly requests a response from Alicorn.

Moderators: please withdraw your upvotes from the parent until you can come up with a course of action that would have satisfied both kodos96 and jimrandomh's constraints; otherwise, you're venturing deep into politicsland.