You extend to me quite a bit of courtesy here, and your tone is very generous although you disagree with me. I seem to see a lot of posts these days that skip the courtesy (which is necessary for productive discourse, rationality is about winning, etc.) and start with "You're wrong" and then proceed from there with middle fingers raised. I do think most of these are relative newcomers, as you say.
Any post trying to say something complex is bound to have multiple valid interpretations. This is just a fact of communication and the difficulty of expressing ideas using language. The truth of this is borne out by the fact that multiple commenters responding to the same post will interpret the original post differently. So, it is not so radical, I think, for me to suggest that we wait to say "I disagree!" or "You're wrong!" until after we've first said "Let me make sure I understand what it is you're saying."
You extend to me quite a bit of courtesy here, and your tone is very generous although you disagree with me. I seem to see a lot of posts these days that skip the courtesy (which is necessary for productive discourse, rationality is about winning, etc.) and start with "You're wrong" and then proceed from there with middle fingers raised. I do think most of these are relative newcomers, as you say.
This reminds me of Cynical about Cynicism where Yudkowsky writes:
...Which in turn means that rationalists, and especially apprentice rationalists wat
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.