shokwave comments on Newtonmas Meetup, 12/25/2010 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Kevin 22 December 2010 06:27AM

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Comment author: shokwave 26 December 2010 08:35:54AM 1 point [-]

There is a prescriptive/descriptive divide here, and it does us no good to dance either side of it.

Descriptively:

Eliezer's claim that comments of that form will get downvoted may be factually incorrect, given that it's possible to, as you showed, create comments of that form that express sentiments most people would upvote.

The qualifier "almost" placed in front of his comment would suffice to cover these situations.

Prescriptively:

I don't think that any comment that fits that form should be "automatically [...] downvoted to oblivion"

is a prescriptive statement, and one which I attempted to explain was wrong.

We are tripping over this divide, and several different meanings of 'wrong'. Basically, we're making different distinctions to each other, and probably ascribing incorrect intentions to each other. Are there any other possible mismatches I haven't noticed?