wedrifid comments on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: matt 01 September 2010 01:40AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 21 September 2010 05:27:13AM *  -1 points [-]

You're starting to sound like a troll. I would feel less sure of that if you hadn't just admitted that you don't expect to care what you're arguing about in another comment.

It is my policy to remove comments whenever social aggressors find them to be useful to take out of context and have done so with the subject of your link, assuring Resgui that it was nothing to do with him.

In that discussion Relsqui and I came to an amicable agreement to disagree. He (if he'll pardon the assumption of gender and chastise me if I have made an incorrect inference) had already made some hints in that direction in the ancestor and acknowledging that I too didn't think such a trivial matter of word definition was really worth arguing about is a gesture of respect. (Some people find it annoying if the other person leaves them hanging, especially if they had offered to extend the discussion mostly as a gesture of goodwill, which is what I had taken from Relsqui.)

I'll note that whatever you may think of me personally a distinguishing feature of trolls is that they enjoy provoking an emotional response in others while on the other hand I find it unsavoury. Even though I have actively developed myself in order to have a thicker 'emotional skin' (see related concurrent discussion) with when it comes to frustrations this sort of conflict will always be a net psychological drain.

My goal was to support Will's comment in the face of a reply that I would have found frustrating and was also an error in reasoning. In the future I will reply directly to Will (or whomever), expressing agreement and elaborating on the point with more details. Replying to the undesired comment gave more attention to it rather than less and obscuration would perhaps have been more useful than rebuttal.

Comment author: Relsqui 21 September 2010 06:26:07AM *  4 points [-]

a distinguishing feature of trolls is that they enjoy provoking an emotional response in others while on the other hand I find it unsavoury

For what it's worth, it is very hard to distinguish between someone who is deliberately provoking a negative reaction and someone who is not very practiced at anticipating what choices of language or behavior might cause one. I, like datadataeverywhere, did get the impression that you were at least one of those things; off the top of my head, here are a few specific reasons:

  • Your initial comment disagreed with my terminology without actually addressing it directly, merely asserting that I was wrong without providing evidence nor argument. This struck me as aggressive and also poorly reasoned.
  • You persisted in the argument about definition despite, as you later said, not caring about it. I did not continue that thread out of goodwill but out of a desire to resolve the disagreement and return to the original topic--hence stopping and checking in that we were on the same page. That's why it annoyed me when you said you didn't care; in that case, I wish we hadn't wasted the time on it!
  • Applying the label "social aggressor" in response to someone who is explicitly trying to find out what's going on in the conversation and steer it somewhere useful. (In fairness, dde suggesting you're a troll was not necessary either, but the situations are different in that I have not noticed you specifically trying to get the conversation on track.)
  • Not answering direct questions, especially when they are designed to return the conversation to a productive topic.

I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds by spelling this out; my impression of the LW community is that constructive criticism is encouraged. Therefore, I'm giving you specific suggestions to avoid making a negative impression you seem to not want to make. Conveniently, this will also resolve the ambiguity in my first (non-quoted) sentence in this comment. If you confirm that you want to avoid garnering negative reactions in conversation, it'll be clear that you are indeed not a troll.

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