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RichardKennaway comments on How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre - Less Wrong
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Yes, so you're doing what everyone else did throughout my life: you're attributing unflattering motivations to me that I don't have. It's not just you, it's almost everyone who I've interacted with.
My uncharitable interpretation of this sort of thing was
I never talked about this, because I figured that there was no point: I thought "these people have dug themselves into such a deep epistemic rabbit hole that they can't out of it – they can't see me for who I am independently of what I say.
My current hypothesis is that you're not doing this, you don't have some sort of evil Hansonian agenda, rather, the situation is instead that you don't know that it's possible for humans to rewire their motivations so as to be almost completely unrelated to relative status.
What do you think?
In a text-only medium, what you say is all there is. Even face to face, what you say is a large part of what there is. And in any case, what you say flows from who you are.
What would you have people do instead?
Are you actively trying to misinterpret his point?
No. It is possible that I have, nonetheless, misinterpreted his point. However, having reread the context, I see nothing amiss; I am not seeing whatever it is that you are seeing. What are you seeing?
He's saying, more or less: people take me too literally, they miss the forest for the trees. Your response was to nitpick his statement in a way that missed that point he was trying to make. It seemed ironic, in a way that would irritate me endlessly if I were Jonah.
Ok, yes, I find nitpicking tedious and a great pain also, and far too much of it goes on on LW. But I was not intending a nitpick, but the basic point that what anyone says is their presentation of who they are. Charitable reading and forest and trees and etc. understood, everything that Jonah wants to communicate still has to come through the bottleneck of his words.