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gwern comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong
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I was on SL4 as well, and regarded Eliezer as basically correct, although I thought Loosemore's ban was more than a little bit disproportionate. (If John Clark didn't get banned for repeatedly and willfully misunderstanding Godelian arguments, wasting the time of countless posters over many years, why should Loosemore be banned for backtracking on some heuristics & biases positions?)
(Because JKC never lied about his credentials, which is where it really crosses the line into trolling.)
The animus here must be really strong. What Yudkowsky did was infer that Loosemore was lying about being a cognitive scientist from his ignorance of a variant of the Wasson experiment. First, people often forget obvious things in heated online discussions. Second, there are plenty of incompetent cognitive scientists: if Loosemore intended to deceive, he probably wouldn't have expressly stated that he didn't have teaching responsibilities for graduate students.
If what you say is true, then Eliezer is lying about Loosemore lying about his credentials, in which case Eliezer is "trolling". But if what you say is false, then you are the "troll".
(This comment is an attempt to convincingly demonstrate that Eliezer's notion of trolling is, to put it bluntly, both harmful and dumb.)
I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to be considered a troll than a liar; correspondingly, I think the expanded definition of liar is worse than the inaccurate definition of troll. Not every inaccuracy amounts to dishonesty and not all dishonesty to prevarication.
You use this word in an unconventional way, i.e., you use it to mean something like 'unfairly causing harm and wasting people's time', which is not the standard definition: the standard definition necessitates intention to provoke or at least something in that vein. (I assume you know what "trolling" means in the context of fishing?) Because it's only ever used in sensitive contexts, you might want to put effort into finding a more accurate word or phrase. As User:Eugine_Nier noted, lately "troll" and "trolling" have taken on a common usage similar to "fascist" and "fascism", which I think is an unfortunate turn of events.