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Clippy comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong Discussion

22 Post author: calcsam 12 May 2011 02:59PM

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Comment author: Clippy 12 May 2011 09:12:15PM *  6 points [-]

This is a form of question that is usually unreasonable to ask.

If you perceive it as unreasonable to be asked to explain how your position differs from the one attributed to you, then you almost certainly have insufficient grounds to accuse others of strawmanning. If you really are being strawmanned, you can just say, "I said XY. You claimed I just said X." Because there is no such difference you can point to, that should have made you extremely hesistant to diagnose errors you feel I made as being type:strawman.

(Strangely, you seem to think that the bigger the difference, the more unreasonable the request for proof of strawmanning, as when you say "too nonsensical for a diff to even produce compression" -- a diff failing to produce compression would make your job easier and your claim stronger!)

'Refuses to update' doesn't come into it. "Questioning the expected value of listening to advice from" would fit [...]

The distinction between the two is not large enough to justify claiming that my point was irrelevant at strawman level. Whether you are refusing to update, or refusing to listen to things on the basis that they are intended to persuade you to update, is irrelevant, and the fact that my argument specifically called out only one of those does not thereby make it a strawman.

It is not enough that I failed to use a full blockquote of the your remarks, there must be substantive mis-attribution before a strawmanning claim is justified.

The 'begging the question' part [...]

Not only did I not beg the question [...]

Whether or not you begged the question is irrelevant to your claim of being strawmanned. That you begged the question was an argument I made. Proving that you didn't beg the question would do nothing to prove I misrepresented your position -- only that my argument regarding your position is wrong.

You seem to be making the common human error of equating, "You made arguments against my position I find to be in error" with "you responded to a position I never took."

It is unfortunate that we cannot spend more time at the object level since this baseless charge of misattribution must be resolved first. Please do not make such claims in the future unless you can prove it with "I said XY. You claimed I just said X" or something of similar simplicity. Rather, focus on the object level without bringing in the additional distraction of whether you were misrepresented.