In the response I would have wanted to see, Duncan would have clearly and correctly pointed to that difference. He is in favor of people asking for examples [combined with other efforts to cross the gap], does it himself, gives examples himself, and so on. The unsaid [without anything else] part is load-bearing and thus inappropriate to leave out or merely hint at. [Or, alternatively, using "ask people for examples" to refer to comments that do only that, as opposed to the conversational move which can be included or not in a comment with other moves.]

I agree that the hypothetical comment you describe as better is in fact better. I think something like ... twenty-or-so exchanges with Said ago, I would have written that comment?  I don't quite know how to weigh up [the comment I actually wrote is worse on these axes of prosocial cooperation and revealing cruxes and productively clarifying disagreement and so forth] with [having a justified true belief that putting forth that effort with Said in particular is just rewarded with more branches being created].

(e.g. there was that one time recently where Said said I'd blocked people due to disagreeing with me/criticizing me, and I said no, I haven't blocked anybody for disagreeing/criticizing, and he responded "I didn’t say anything about 'blocked for disagreeing [or criticizing]'. (Go ahead, check!)" and the actual thing he'd said was that they'd been blocked due to disagreeing/criticizing; that's the level of ... gumming up the works? gish-gallop? ... that I've viscerally come to expect.)

Like, I think there's plausibly a CEV-ish code of conduct in which I "should", at that point, still have put forth the effort, but I think it's also plausible that the correct code of conduct is one in which doing so is a genuine mistake and ... noticing that there's a hypothetical "better" comment is not the same as there being an implication that I should've written it?

Something something, how many turns of the cheek are actually correct, especially given that, the week prior, multiple commenters had been unable, with evidence+argument+personal testimony, to shift Said away from a strikingly uncharitable prior.

(This does not count as two hypotheses in my culture.)

Mine either, to be clear; I felt by that point that Said had willingly put himself outside of the set of [signatories to the peace treaty], turning down many successive opportunities to remain in compliance with it.  I was treating his statements closer to the way I think it is correct to treat the statements of the literal Donald Trump than the way I think it is correct to treat the statements of an undistinguished random Republican.

(I can go into the reasoning for that in more detail, but it seems sort of conflicty to do so unprompted.)

If Said ate breakfasts of only cereal, and Duncan said that was unhealthy and he shouldn't do it, it is not quite right to say Duncan 'thinks you shouldn't eat cereal', as he might be in favor of cereal as part of a balanced breakfast; but also it is not quite right for Duncan to ignore Said's point that one of the main issues under contention is whether Said can eat cereal by itself (i.e. asking for examples without putting in interpretative labor).

I'm a little lost in this analogy; this is sort of where the privileging-the-hypothesis complaint comes in.

The conversation had, in other places, centered on the question of whether Said can eat cereal by itself; Logan for instance highlighted Said's claim in a reply on FB:

Furthermore, you have mentioned the “inferential gap” several times, and suggested that it is the criticizer’s job, at least in part, to bridge it. I disagree.

There, the larger question of "can you eat only cereal, or must you eat other things in balance?" is front-and-center.

But at that point in the subthread, it was not front-and-center; yes, it was relevant context, but the specific claim being made by Said was clear, and discrete, and not at all dependent-on or changed-by that context.

The history of that chain:

Said includes, in a long comment "In summary, I think that what’s been described as 'aiming for convergence on truth' is some mixture of" ... "contentless" ... "good but basically unrelated to the rest of it" ... "bad (various proposed norms of interaction such as 'don't ask people for examples of their claims' and so on)"

gjm, in another long comment, includes "I don't know where you get 'don't ask people for examples of their claims' from and it sounds like a straw man" and goes on to elaborate "I think the things Duncan has actually said are more like 'Said engages in unproductive modes of discussion where he is constantly demanding more and more rigour and detail from his interlocutors while not providing it himself', and wherever that lands on a scale from '100% truth' to '100% bullshit' it is not helpful to pretend that he said 'it is bad to ask people for examples of their claims'.

There's a bunch of other stuff going on in their back and forth, but that particular thread has been isolated and directly addressed, in other words.  gjm specifically noted the separation between the major issue of whether balance is required, and this other, narrower claim.

Said replied:

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”.

Which, yes, I straightforwardly agree with the if-then statement; if "asking people for examples of their claims" didn't fit my stated criteria for what constitutes acceptable engagement or criticism, then it would be correct to describe me as advocating for a norm of "don't ask people for examples of their claims."

But like.  The if does not hold.  It really clearly doesn't hold.  It was enough of an out-of-nowhere strawman/non-sequitur that gjm specifically called it out as "???" at which point Said doubled down, saying the above and also

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.

It seems like, in your interpretation, I "should" (in some sense) be extending a hand of charity and understanding and, I dunno, helping Said to coax out his broader, potentially more valid point—helping him to get past his own strawman and on to something more steel, or at least flesh.  Like, if I am reading you correctly above, you're saying that, by focusing in on the narrow point that had been challenged by gjm and specifically reaffirmed by Said, I myself was making some sort of faux pas.

(Am I in fact reading you correctly?)

I do not think so.  I think that, twenty exchanges prior, I perhaps owed Said something like that degree of care and charity and helping him avoid tying his own shoelaces together.  I certainly feel I would owe it to, I dunno, Eric Rogstad or Julia Galef, and would not be the slightest bit loath to provide it.

But here, Said had just spent several thousand words the week prior, refusing to be budged from a weirdly uncharitable belief about the internals of my mind, despite that belief being incoherent with observable evidence and challenged by multiple non-me people.  I don't think it's wise-in-the-sense-of-wisdom to a) engage with substantial charity in that situation, or b) expect someone else to engage with substantial charity in that situation.

(You can tell that my stated criteria do not rule out asking people for examples of their claims in part because I've written really quite a lot about what I think constitutes acceptable engagement or criticism, and I've just never come anywhere close to a criterion like that, nor have I ever complained about someone asking for examples unless it was after a long, long string of what felt like them repeatedly not sharing in the labor of truthseeking. Like, the closest I can think of is this thread with tailcalled, in which (I think/I hope) it's pretty clear that what's going on is that I was trying to cap the total attention paid to the essay and its discussion, and thus was loath to enter into something like an exchange of examples—not that it was bad in any fundamental sense for someone to want some.  I did in fact provide some, a few comments deeper in the thread, though I headlined that I hadn't spent much time on them.)

So in other words: I don't think it was wrong to focus on the literal, actual claim that Said had made (since he made it, basically, twice in a row, affirming "no, I really mean this" after gjm's objection and even saying that he thinks it is so obvious as to not be controversial.  I don't think I "ought" to have had a broader focus, under the circumstances—Said was making a specific, concrete, and false claim, and his examples utterly fail to back up that specific, concrete, and false claim (though I do agree with you that they back up something like his conception of our broader disagreement).

I dunno, I'm feeling kind of autistic, here, but I feel like if, on Less Wrong dot com, somebody makes a specific, concrete claim about my beliefs or policies, clarifies that yes, they really meant that claim, and furthermore says that such-and-such links are "citations for [me] expressing the sentiment [they've] ascribed to [me]" when they simply are not—

It feels like emphatic and unapologetic rejection should be 100% okay, and not looked at askance.  The fact that they are citations supporting a different claim is (or at least, I claim, should be) immaterial; it's not my job to steelman somebody who spent hours and hours negatively psychologizing me in public (while claiming to have no particular animus, which, boy, a carbon copy of Said sure would have had Words about).

I think there's a thing here of standards unevenly applied; surely whatever standard would've had me address Said's "real" concern would've also had Said behave much differently at many steps prior, possibly never strawmanning me so hard in the first place?

I think this situation is, on some level, pretty symmetric.

1. I think the features of Said's commenting style that people (not just Duncan!) find annoying are things that Said is deliberately optimizing for or the results of principled commitments he's made, so it's not just a simple bug that can be fixed.
2. I think the features of Duncan's conflict resolution methods that people find offputting are similarly things that Duncan is deliberately optimizing for or the results of principled commitments he's made, so it's not just a simple bug that can be fixed.

I think the asymmetry breaks in that, like, a bunch of people have asked Said to stop and he won't; I'm quite eager to stop doing the conflict resolution that people don't like, if there can pretty please be some kind of system in place that obviates it. I much prefer the world where there are competent police to the world where I have to fight off muggers in the alley—that's why I'm trying so hard to get there to be some kind of actually legible standards rather than there always being some plausible reason why maybe we shouldn't just say "no" to the bullshit that Zack or Said or anonymouswhoever is pulling.

Right now, though, it feels like we've gone from "Ben Hoffman will claim Duncan wants to ghettoize people and it'll be left upvoted for nine days with no mod action" to "Ray will expound on why he thinks it's kinda off for Said to be doing what he's doing but there won't be anything to stop Said from doing it" and I take Oli's point about this stuff being hard and there being other priorities but like, it's been years.  And I get a stance of, like, "well, Duncan, you're asking for a lot," but I'm trying pretty hard to earn it, and to ... pave the way?  Help make the ask smaller? ... with things like the old Moderating LessWrong post and the Concentration of Force post and the more recent Basics post.  Like, I can't think of much more that someone with zero authority and zero mantle can do.  My problem is that abuse and strawmanning of me gets hosted on LW and upvoted on LW and people are like, well, maybe if you patiently engaged with and overturned the abuse and strawmanning in detail instead of fighting back—

I dunno.  If mods would show up and be like "false" and "cut it out" I would pretty happily never get into a scrap on LW ever again.  

Locally, my sense is Duncan started it,

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This, more than anything else, is like "just give up and leave, this is definitely not a garden."

I didn't make it to every point, but hopefully you find this more of the substantive engagement you were hoping for.