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RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread, October 13 - 19, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (247)
Those who have been reading LessWrong in the last couple of weeks will have little difficulty recognizing the poster of the following. I'm posting this here, shorn of identities and content, as there is a broader point to make about Dark Arts.
These are, at the time of writing, his two most recent comments. I will focus on the evidential markers, and have omitted everything else. I had to skip entirely over only a single sentence of the original, and that sentence was the hypothetical answer to a rhetorical question.
Someone replied to that, and his reply was:
In every sentence, he is careful to say nothing, while appearing to say everything. His other postings are not so dense with these thin pipings of doubt, but they are a constant part of his voice.
Most of us have read or watched Tolkien. Some have read C.S. Lewis. We know this character, and we can recognise his voice anywhere. Lewis called him Professor Weston; Tolkien called him Grima Wormtongue.
I'm having difficulty recognizing the poster of the following, and searching individual phrases is only turning up this comment. While I approve of making broad points about Dark Arts, I'm worried that you're doing so with a parable rather than an anecdote, which is a practice I disapprove of.
I'm guessing that RichardKennaway means this post and the related open thread.
I, thankfully, missed that the first time around. Worry resolved. (Also, score one for the deletion / karma system, that that didn't show up in Google searches.)
I couldn't figure it out, either-- the good news is that someone who's so vague has a reasonable chance of being so boring as to be forgettable.
I'm fairly certain that the user RK is referring to was deleted from the site.
EDIT: But I am wrong! He wrote a post that got deleted, and I got confused.
Not as of this writing.
corrected, thanks
I agree that being slippery and vague is usually bad, and one way to employ Dark Arts.
However, avoiding qualifiers of uncertainty and not softening one's statements at all exposes oneself to other kinds of dark arts. Even here, it's not reasonable to expect conversants to be mercifully impartial about everything. Someone who expects strong opposition would soften their language more than someone whose statements are noncontroversial.
There's slippery, and there's vague. The one that I have not named is certainly being slippery, yet is not at all vague. It is quite clear what he is insinuating, and on close inspection, clear that he is not actually saying it.
Qualifiers of uncertainty should be employed to the degree that one is actually uncertain, and vagueness to the degree that one's ideas are vague. In diplomacy it has been remarked that what looks like a vague statement may be a precise statement of a deliberately vague idea.
If your concerns are valid, then it doesn't help those that are not aware of who you are talking about, by hiding the identity of the accused. We're all grown ups here we can handle it.
I think the pattern is also important per se. You can meet the pattern in the future, in another place.
It's a pattern of how to appear reasonable, cast doubt on everything, and yet never say anything tangible that could be used against you. It's a way to suggest that other people are wrong somehow, without accusing them directly, so they can't even defend themselves. It is not even clear if the person doing this has some specific mission, or if breeding uncertainty and suspicion is their sole mission.
And the worst thing, it works. When it happens, expect such person to be upvoted, and people who point at them (such as Richard), downvoted.
As Viliam_Bur says, it is the general pattern that is my subject here, not to heap further opprobrium on the one who posted what I excerpted. Goodness knows I've been telling him to his virtual face enough of what I think of him already.
More from Tolkien.