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calef comments on Typical Sneer Fallacy - Less Wrong
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Comments (44)
I suspect the anecdote about Eliezer only sidetracks your readers.
Hence the problem with sneer in actual criticism. Not that I'm opposed to sneering. Far from it. But you'd better be making solid points while you sneer. If you make a bunch of half ass points just to sneer, don't expect people to dig your one diamond out of that pile of crap. They will look elsewhere for criticism, if they're interested in it at all. And quite reasonably so.
EY writes:
Yep. Don't expect to find diamonds in a pile of crap. Expect to find more crap.
I suspect how reader's respond to my anecdote about Eliezer will fall along party lines, so to speak.
Which is kind of the point of the whole post. How one responds to the criticism shouldn't be a function of one's loyalty to Eliezer. Especially when su3su2u1 explicitly isn't just "making up most of" his criticism. Yes, his series of review-posts are snarky, but he does point out legitimate science errors. That he chooses to enjoy HPMOR via (c) rather than (a) shouldn't have any bearing on the true-or-false-ness of his criticism.
I've read su3su2u1's reviews. I agree with them. I also really enjoyed HPMOR. This doesn't actually require cognitive dissonance.
(I do agree, though, that snarkiness isn't really useful in trying to get people to listen to criticism, and often just backfires)
My response, the moment I read the paragraph beginning "This is the point in the article where..." was, "This is the real subject of the post and will be a criticism of the person named. The preamble was written to generate priming and framing for the claims, which will be unsubstantiated other than by reference to a discussion somewhere else."
I mean, if you'd like to talk about the object level point of "was the criticism of Eliezer actually true", we can do that. The discussion elsewhere is kind of extensive, which is why I tried to focus on the meta-level point of the Typical Sneer Fallacy.
"I'm going to use Joe as an example of The Bad Thing, but whether or not he actually is an example isn't the real point."
On my meta-level point, do you see how this would rankle a person's basic sense of fairness regardless of how they felt about Joe?
I never claimed whether he was or not wasn't Important. I just didn't focus on that aspect of the argument because it's been discussed at length elsewhere (the reddit thread, for example). And I've repeatedly offered to talk about the object level point if people were interested.
I'm not sure why someone's sense of fairness would be rankled when I directly link to essentially all of the evidence on the matter. It would be different if I was just baldly claiming "Eliezer done screwed up" without supplying any evidence.
I'm not particularly interested in that. It just seemed to me that the example was the point of the article and the meta-stuff was there only to be a support for it.
I mean, people in class (d) are straightforwardly committing what one might call the Sneer Fallacy. Sneering is their bottom line, and it's even easier to sneer than to make an argument. To adapt C.S. Lewis, it is hard to make an argument, but effortless to pretend that an argument has been made. A similar sentiment is expressed in the catchphrase "haters gonna hate".
But you skip over that and go straight to a meta-fallacy of misidentifying someone as committing Sneer. This seems too small a target to be worth the attention of a post. Eliezer, on the other hand, is a big target. Therefore Eliezer, and not Sneer Fallacy Fallacy, is the real subject.
Yes, I wrote this article because Eliezer very publicly committed the typical sneering fallacy. But I'm not trying to character-assassinate Eliezer. I'm trying to identify a poisonous sort of reasoning, and indicate that everyone does it, even people that spends years of their life writing about how to be more rational.
I think Eliezer is pretty cool. I aso don't think he's immune from criticism, nor do I think he's an inappropriate target of this sort of post.
The problem is that there is no way for anyone to check your claims about the cited thread without closely reading a large amount of contentious discussion of HPMOR and all the parts of HPMOR being talked about, in order to work out who is being wrong on the Internet. Whoever is going to do that?
I never said that determining the sincerity of criticism would be easy. I can step through the argument with links, I'd you'd like!
Your dedication to the cause of discerning who has rightly discerned who has rightly discerned errors in HPMOR greatly exceeds mine. I shall leave it there.
Haha fair enough!
Which makes for a handy immunizing strategy against criticisms of your post, n'est–ce pas?
Nor, perhaps, is yanking in opposition to people's party affiliations useful in trying to get them to listen to an idea.
I'm actually all for snark and ridicule, but then you really need to be hitting your target, because it is reasonable for people to update that a criticism is relatively unconcerned about finding the truth when it demonstrates another motivation being pursued.
It's my understanding that your criticism of my post was that the anecdote would be distracting. One of the explicit purposes of my post was to examine a polarizing example of [the fallacy of not taking criticism seriously] in action--an example which you proceed to not take seriously in your very first post in this thread simply because of a quote you have of Eliezer blowing the criticism off.
The ultimate goal here is to determine how to evaluate criticism. Learning how to do that when the criticism comes from across party lines is central.
I'm not sure he actually enjoyed it (e.g. 1, 2), be it through fault-finding or otherwise...