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wedrifid comments on LessWrong podcasts - Less Wrong
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Comments (96)
Your intended influence is not in the direction of making it more easy for the rest of the world to communicate effectively on lesswrong---in fact it is the reverse. DaFranker is already far more willing than most to attempt to communicate with you despite your manner and without reciprocating your debate tactics. The presumption you made is that DaFranker should be expected to push himself to implausible extremes of tolerance, patience and rational thinking so that he is somehow able to resurrect the possibility of communicating with you. This kind of expectation is the opposite of what it takes to adapt to communicating with normal people.
Most of the world cares about belligerent tone. Your argument undermines your position.
That a belligerent tone precludes/hinders most people from parsing the actual content and limits them in their immediate rational thinking capacity is - to me - a clear failure mode which, as you say, is unfortunately characteristic for "normal people".
A belligerent tone does obviously in itself convey certain information, mostly relative to status squabbles, and should be filed away for future reference, not ignored. However, it shouldn't impede the reader's capacity to engage with the argument beyond that tone, and the simple fact that it does constitutes a bias - a cognitive impediment - to be overcome.
Engaging on important topics is hard enough and shouldn't be a training ground for "learning to deal with belligerently presented arguments on the content-level", however it's a useful skill that should be acquired. Otherwise we'd let emotions continue to cloud our judgement, as the Jedi would say.
I agree with all these points. (So it took me a while to conclude that it was not intended as a refutation of the grandparent and instead something that actually supports it then explores the tangent.)
Again, I'm not defending belligerent tone, I'm attacking overly apologetic tones. You tried that strawman once already. Stop falsely accusing me of doing the exact things that you actually are doing.
Be specific. What on earth am I doing that's so disingenuous? You both claim that I'm utilizing advanced level Dark Arts here, and I'm totally clueless on how that might be so. Your vagueness makes me think that maybe you are just blaming me for your own instinctive irrational responses to neutral differences in tones, instead of actually analyzing the (supposedly) manipulative persuasive tendencies in my comments.
I also want to dispute your framing. You frame it as though I'm demanding that DaFranker adjust to my norms, because I deserve it. I'm not. I'm saying that DaFranker would benefit from being able to accept everyone's tones more easily. It's still his choice, and I make no presumptions. Again, I use no Dark Arts, you just use Dark Arts framing tactics to make it look like I do.
Your beliefs about my intentions are wildly inaccurate. Am I supposed to be some kind of evil moron who has a secret plan to impede rational communication? Why would I want to do that? Why would anyone want to do that? What on earth are you basing this belief of yours on?
Overall, you're hiding behind a mask of rationality and politeness while engaging in egregious instances of the things that I criticize. Your criticisms of me are not only inaccurate but actually apply much better to your own comments. This seems like the perfect illustration of my above claim that "we've changed the game to make it more superficially rational, but [it's actually just] more resource intensive and it masks the underlying mindsets that are bad instead of actually changing them".
There is not much more specific I can be than systematically quoting sentences and directly making criticisms below the quotes. As such, this insinuation about lack of specificity may be added to the list of disingenuous claims.
Polite? You think I'm being polite? Hardly. I seem to be being crude, banal, aggressive and cavalier in my opposition to your influence. Surely any err here on my part would be in the lack of politeness, not a superficial overabundance of the same!
(For this reason if it had been the case that my replies were voted down it would only have been a minor annoyance. I can accept that people could in principle have downvoted me for failing to use the tone of a courtier while arguing against tone-indifference. However if chaosmosis's comments had been significantly upvoted I would have been shocked, appalled and disgusted---believing that the voters had unambiguous and objectively poor judgement. This is in contrast to most situations where social reception of my own contributions impact me more than the reception of whichever person happens to be wrong on the internet that day. In this case it seems that I fully endorse my position and arguments but am actually somewhat ambivalent about my stylistic choices.)
Also false. Some of the things that you criticize are actually things that I would probably be well served to have implemented in this case. But sometimes I allow wedrifid to fall short of Machiavellian signalling ideals and be more direct in his expressions of belief and preference than is necessarily optimal for maximizing his status.