Do you suggest that people should be epistemically charitable even towards others (and you specifically) who they don't think are careful thinkers?

Not in general, no. It's pretty context-sensitive. I think they should do so on Less Wrong where we should aim to have insanely exceptionally high standards of group epistemology. I do think that applies doubly for folk like me who have a decent chunk of karma and have spent a lot of time with a lot of very smart people, but I am not sure how many such people contribute to LW, so it's probably not a worthwhile norm to promote. If LW was somewhat saner perhaps they would, though, so it's unclear.

I am a significantly better rationalist than the LW average and I'm on the verge of leaving which says a whole bunch about my lack of ability to communicate, but also some non-negligible amount about LW's ability to understand humans who don't want to engage in the negative sum signalling game of kow-towing to largely-unreflected-upon local norms. (I'm kind of ranting here and maybe even trolling slightly, it's very possible that my evaluations aren't themselves stable under reflection. (But at least I can recognize that...))

How come you don't consider that to be a very important skill?

Right, so your comment unfortunately assumes something incorrect about my psychology, i.e. that it is motivationally possible for me to make my contributions to LW clearer. I once put a passive-aggressive apology at the bottom of one of my comments; perhaps if I continue to contribute to LW I'll clean it up and put it at the bottom of every comment.

Point being, this isn't the should world, and I do not have the necessary energy (or writing skills) to pull an Eliezer and communicate across years' worth of inferential distance. Other humans who could teach what I would teach are busy saving the world, as I try to be. That said, I'm 19 years old and am learning skills at a pretty fast rate. A few years from now I'll definitely have a solid grasp of a lot of the technical knowledge that I currently only informally (if mildly skillfully despite that) know how to play with, and I will also have put a lot more effort into learning to write (or learning to bother to want to communicate effectively). If the rationalist community hasn't entirely disintegrated by then, then perhaps I'll be able to actually explain things for once. That'd be nice.

Back to the question: I consider signalling credibility to be an important skill. I also try to be principled. If I did have the necessary motivation I would probably just pull an Eliezer and painstakingly explain every little detail with its own 15 paragraph post. But there is also some chance that I would just say "I refuse to kow tow to people who are unwilling to put the necessary effort into understanding the subtleties of what I am trying to say, and I doubly refuse to kow tow to people who assume I am being irrational in completely obvious ways simply because I am saying something that sounds unreasonable without filling in all of the gaps for them". But not if I'd spent a lot of time really hammering into my head that this isn't the should world, or if I learned to truly empathize with the psychology of the kind of human that thinks that way, which is pretty much every human ever.

(Not having done these things might be the source of my inability to feel motivated to explain things. Despair at how everyone including LW is batshit insane and because of that everyone I love is going to die, maybe? And there's nothing I can do to change that? That sounds vaguely plausible. Hard to motivate oneself in that kind of situation, hard to expect that anything can actually have a substantial impact. Generalized frustration. I just have to remember, this isn't the should world, it is only delusion that would cause me to expect anything else but this, people do what they have incentive and affordance to do, there is no such thing as magical free will, I am surely contemptible in a thousand similar ways, I implicitly endorse a thousand negative sum games because I've implicitly chosen to not reflect on whether or not they're justified, if anyone can be seen as evil then surely I can, because I actually do have the necessary knowledge to do better, if I am to optimize anyone I may as well start with myself... ad nauseum.)

There's some counterfactual world where I could have written this comment so as to be in less violation of local norms of epistemology and communication, and it is expected of me that I acknowledge that a tradeoff has been made which keeps this world from looking like that slightly-more-optimized world, and feel sorry about that necessity, or something, so I do. I consequently apologize.