I suspect a case of semantic drift and cultural myopia to what happens outside his cultural environment (he did link to the TV Tropes article on DotA rather than the Wikipedian one). After all, we do call ourselves rationalists, yet, unless we link someone to lesswrong or engage in a lengthy explanation, people would call us out on "thinking the (near) exact opposite of the view we are claiming to espouse".

On TV Tropes, when someone says "death of the author", they mean "the author's opinion and his precendents are an optional source of information, but can be disregarded". When they say "deconstruction", they mean "the work experiments with tropes by exploring (often unpleasant) implications that their predecessors seem to have (perhaps wilfully) ignored, often in dramatic and interesting fashions", wich is quite different from the accepted academic meaning of the expression (insofar as it can be said that there is one; "postmodernism" and postomdern-derived terms seem to suffer from the same kind of definition fuzziness, which I suppose is kind of the point of post-modernism).

Either way, I don't think "competence" is the issue here, and I suggest you calm down and sheathe your sword.

As for being excessively charitable, that's my MO; often times people will make mistakes, and, once found out, will kiling to those mistakes and fight to justify them (not merely explain them, like I tried to do earlier with RB's, but defend them as not-mistakes) if they feel their ego is being attacked. This is counterproductive. I'd rather give them the benefit of the doubt, and as much room as possible to acknowledge a mistake or defuse a misunderstanding without that feeling like the loss of a battle of egoes.

That, and, besides my love of truth, there's a selfish motive; when you attack someone mistakenly, and your accusations turn out to be wrong, you'll look... unwholesome, perhaps ridiculous, definitely rash (and in fact, will be put in exactly the humiliation-or-suicide situation I described earlier). I like to minimize the chances of getting stuck in such an uncomfortable position.

As an allegory, think of it as that one time in Les Miserables where Jean Valjean stole the bishop's silverware, and, when the police arrested Jean and brought him before the bishop, the latter claimed the utterly unbelievable claim that he'd given Jean the silverware as a gift. How do you think Jean reacted to that?

Another parable would be that of the prodigal son; give people a line of retreat, and a reward for taking it.

People make mistakes. We all do. I think we can afford to be generous to each other. For instance, if we were unforgiving of irrationality in the people around us, when rationality is so rare in the world, wouldn't we be in a perpetual state of anger, outrage, and disappointment? Wouldn't we madden into misanthropy? I for one prefer to laugh heartily; I always think to myself "I can't believe I used to fall for that" or "I could have fallen for that, in his or her circumstances!".