Phil does this a lot, usually in ways which present me with the dilemma of spending a lot of time correcting him, or letting others pick up a poor idea of what my positions are (because people have a poor ability to discount this kind of evidence). I've said as much to Phil, and he apparently thinks it's fine to go on doing this - that it's good for him to force me to correct him, even though others don't make similar misinterpretations. Whether or not this is done from conscious malice doesn't change the fact that it's a behavior that forces me to expend resources or suffer a penalty, which is game-theoretically a hostile act.
So, to discourage this unpleasant behavior, it seems to me that rather than scratching his itch for his benefit (encouraging repetition), I should make some reply which encourages him not to do it again.
I would like to just reply: "Phil Goetz repeatedly misinterprets what I'm saying in an attempt to force me to correct him, which I consider very annoying behavior and have asked him to stop." If that's not what Phil intends.... well, see how it feels to be misinterpreted, Phil? Unfortunately this comes too close to lying for my tastes, so I'll have to figure out some similar standard reply. Maybe even a standard comment to link to each time he does this.
Ok, I soften my critique given your reply which made a point I hadn't fully considered.
It sounds like the public disrespect is intentional, and it does have a purpose..
To be a good thing to do, you need to believe, among other things:
It would be better I think if you could just privately charge someone for the time wasted;but it does seem...
In passing, I said:
And lo, CronoDAS said:
To which I replied:
There's a certain resemblance here - though not an actual analogy - to the strange position your friend ends up in, after you test the Quantum Theory of Immortality.
For those unfamiliar with QTI, it's a simple simultaneous test of many-worlds plus a particular interpretation of anthropic observer-selection effects: You put a gun to your head and wire up the trigger to a quantum coinflipper. After flipping a million coins, if the gun still hasn't gone off, you can be pretty sure of the simultaneous truth of MWI+QTI.
But what is your watching friend supposed to think? Though his predicament is perfectly predictable to you - that is, you expected before starting the experiment to see his confusion - from his perspective it is just a pure 100% unexplained miracle. What you have reason to believe and what he has reason to believe would now seem separated by an uncrossable gap, which no amount of explanation can bridge. This is the main plausible exception I know to Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
Pity those poor folk who actually win the lottery! If the hypothesis "this world is a holodeck" is normatively assigned a calibrated confidence well above 10-8, the lottery winner now has incommunicable good reason to believe they are in a holodeck. (I.e. to believe that the universe is such that most conscious observers observe ridiculously improbable positive events.)
It's a sad situation to be in - but don't worry: it will always happen to someone else, not you.