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ThisSpaceAvailable comments on Inquiry into community standards - Less Wrong Discussion

-19 Post author: ThisSpaceAvailable 06 August 2014 08:22PM

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Comment author: ThisSpaceAvailable 15 August 2014 06:03:09AM 0 points [-]

I didn't say anything about banning.

Those aren't weird deontological rules

Asserting disagreement with a compound term engenders ambiguity. Are they not weird? Not deontological? Not rules? A combination?

It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you, and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general.

"Treating everyone who complaining about being bullied seriously" isn't the same as "Automatically taking the side of everyone who complains". It's bizarre to claim that you must oppose the general phenomenon of complaints, rather than addressing a problem with a specific complaint. My karma is now 42% positive for the last month. This one thread has lost me more karma than I've accrued over the entire last month. And you're saying that there's a chilling effect against gwern?

Despite the rudeness, Gwern's replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts.

Really? In the first thread, gwern wrote that the threats were bluffs, and then said he had not said that and I was dishonest in thinking he did. In the other one, he spent several posts evading the question of how IQ is additive.

Regardless of whether this person feels bullied by Gwern, everyone can take a look at the threads involved and decide if it's an appropriate response.

And everyone can look at posts and decide for themselves whether downvoting was justified. And yet that didn't stop several people from making top level post complaining about mass downvoting. And really, what kind of response is "Everyone can decide whether the response was appropriate" to accusations of bullying?

I don't think calling someone out for something like this in a top level post (not to mention that's a pretty low quality post even for discussion) and impugning the entire community as irrational or whatever is at all proportional.

So, on the one hand, you say that everyone can see for themselves whether the behavior is appropriate, but on the other hand you take umbrage at my concluding from the lack of downvotes against gwern that the community as a whole is expressing a lack of concern regarding gwern's behavior?

If thisspaceavailable (or you) want Lesswrong as a WHOLE to be less rude, rather than making a post that (clearly in my mind) is just getting back at Gwern, there are a LOT better ways to do it.

What are they? And is there a way to ask what those are, that don't involve people calling me a whiner and massively downvoting me?

Comment author: drethelin 15 August 2014 02:32:50PM -2 points [-]

You're clearly not communicating in good faith. I'm not really interested in talking to someone who is either a troll or so convinced of their rightness that they're blindly misreading what people say.

And if 18 karma is more than you've earned in a month, you might try being a less terrible commenter.

Comment author: ThisSpaceAvailable 19 August 2014 03:47:52AM 0 points [-]

You're clearly not communicating in good faith.

I most certainly am communicating in good faith, and the fact that you find such a false conclusion "obvious" speaks poorly for your discernment skills. You, on the other hand, have engaged in such dishonest behavior as referring to one of my posts as "an underhanded attempt to shame someone into saying what you want them to say". I do not have a particular thing that I am trying to get gwern to say. If he wants to disagree with me, that's fine. What I have a problem with is him disagreeing with me, and not defending his disagreement, AND calling me a liar for not agreeing with him.

I'm not really interested in talking to someone who is either a troll or so convinced of their rightness that they're blindly misreading what people say.

What have I misread?

And if 18 karma is more than you've earned in a month, you might try being a less terrible commenter.

  1. The total downvotes in this thread for my posts is 43, and if you add in the downvotes I've gotten in other threads for posts regarding this matter, it's probably more than 50.

  2. How does having a low karma count mean that I am a "terrible commenter"? Does one have to have a minimum number of karma points before you consider them to not fair game for gratuitous insults? Before this issue arose, my karma rating was around 90% positive.

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