This is not directly related to the current situation, but I think is in part responsible for it.

Said claims that it is impossible to guess what someone might mean by something they wrote, if for some reason the reader decided that the writer likely didn't intend the straightforward interpretation parsed by the reader.  It's somewhat ambiguous to me whether Said thinks that this is impossible for him, specifically, or impossible for people (either most or all).

Relevant part of the first comment making this point:

(B) Alice meant something other than what it seems like she wrote.

What might that be? Who knows. I could try to guess what Alice meant. However, that is impossible. So I won’t try. If Alice didn’t mean the thing that it seems, on a straightforward reading, like she meant, then what she actually meant could be anything at all.

Relevant part of the second comment:

“Impossible” in a social context means “basically never happens, and if it does happen then it is probably by accident” (rather than “the laws of physics forbid it!”). Also, it is, of course, possible to guess what someone means by sheer dumb luck—picking an interpretation at random out of some pool of possibilities, no matter how unlikely-seeming, and managing by chance to be right.

But, I can’t remember a time when I’ve read what someone said, rejected the obvious (but obviously wrong) interpretation, tried to guess what they actually meant, and succeeded. When I’ve tried, the actual thing that (as it turned out) they meant was always something which I could never have even imagined as a hypothesis, much less picked out as the likeliest meaning. (And, conversely, when someone else has tried to interpret my comments in symmetric situations, the result has been the same.)

In my experience, this is true: for all practical purposes, either you understand what someone meant, or it’s impossible to guess what they could’ve meant instead.

For the sake of argument, I will accept that Said finds this impossible.  With that said, the idea that this is impossible - or that it "basically never happens, and if it does happen then it is probably by accident" - is incompatible with my experience, and the experience of approximately anybody I have queried on the subject.  (Said may object here, and claim that people are not reliable reporters.  And yet conversations happen anyways; I've done this before in situations where there was no possible double illusion of transparency.  This is not to say that there are no trade-offs; I would not be surprised if Said finds himself confidently holding an incorrect understanding of others' claims less often than most people.)

My guess is that this is responsible for a large part of what many consider to be objectionable about Said's conversational style.  Many other objections presented in the comments here (and in the past) seem confused, wrong, or misguided.  It might be slightly more pleasant to read Said's comments if he added some trimmings of "niceness" to them, but I agree with him that sort of thing carries meaningful costs.  Rather, I think the bigger problem is that the way Said responds to other people's writing, when he is e.g. seeking clarification, or arguing a point, is that he does not believe in the value of interpretive labor, and therefore doesn't think it's valuable to do any upfront work to reduce how much interpretive labor his interlocutors will need to do, since according to him, that should in any case be "zero".

This basically doesn't work when you're trying to communicate with people who do, in fact, successfully^[1] do interpretive labor, and therefore expect their conversational partners to share in that effort, to some degree.

Separately, and more to the matter at hand, although I think that there were supererogatory paths that Duncan could have taken to reduce escalation at various points, I do think that Said's claim that Duncan advocated for a norm of interaction accurately described as "don't ask people for examples of their claims" was obviously unsupported by his linked evidence.  After Duncan calls this out, Said doubles down, and then later (in the comments on this post) tries to offload this onto a distinction between whether he was making a claim about what Duncan literally wrote, vs. what could straightforwardly be inferred about Duncan's intentions (based on what he wrote).

I find this uncompelling given that Said has also admitted (in the comments here) that his literal claim was indeed a strawman, while at the same time the entire thread was precipitated by gjm indicating that he thought the claim was a strawman.  Said claims to have then given a more "clarified and narrow form" of his claim in response to gjm's comment:

If “asking people for examples of their claims” doesn’t fit Duncan’s stated criteria for what constitutes acceptable engagement/criticism, then it is not pretending, but in fact accurate, to describe Duncan as advocating for a norm of “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”. (See, for example, this subthread on this very post, where Duncan alludes to good criticism requiring that the critic “[put] forth at least half of the effort required to bridge the inferential gap between you and the author as opposed to expecting them to connect all the dots themselves”. Similar descriptions and rhetoric can be found in many of Duncan’s recent posts and comments.)

Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says “what are some examples of this claim?” is, in his view, unacceptable. That’s what I was talking about. I really do not think it’s controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan.

If Said is referring to the parenthetical starting with "See, for example", then I am sorry to say that adding such a parenthetical in the context of repeating the original claim nearly verbatim (to describe Duncan as advocating for a norm of “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”, and “what are some examples of this claim?” is, in his view, unacceptable) does not count as clarifying or narrowing his claim, but is simply performing the same motion that Duncan took issue with, which is attempting to justify a false claim with evidence that would support a slightly-related but importantly different claim.

I'm leaving out a lot of salient details because this is, frankly, exhausting.  I think the dynamics around Killing Socrates were not great, but I also have less well-formed thoughts there.

1. ^{^}

   Sometimes - often enough that it's worth relying on, at least.