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XiXiDu comments on Breaking the vicious cycle - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (125)
That's implying a false equivalence. If I make a quotes page of a public person, a person with far-reaching goals, in order to highlight problematic beliefs this person holds, beliefs that would otherwise be lost in a vast amount of other statements, then this is not the same as making a "random stranger X sucks" page.
Stressful fights adversely affect an existing condition.
I have maybe deleted 5 comments and edited another 5. If I detect other mistakes I will fix them. You make it sound like doing so is somehow bad.
You are one of the people spouting comments such as this one for a long time. I reckon you might not see that such comments are a cause of what I wrote in the past.
Then again, LW does not have a "Why Anything Sucks" page as far as I'm aware. There are plenty of people/organizations out there with whom LW/MIRI disagree, and who are more visible than you, but I don't think LW has ever gone out of its way to make posts on why those people/organizations are bad. The fact is that in order to promote good discussion, you just don't want to have a page saying that the members of website/organization with whom you're having the discussion suck. (And while you might call it "highlighting problematic beliefs", the simple fact is that much of what you've posted about LW/MIRI is mean-spirited and hurtful, both of which are qualities that I don't think most "highlighting problematic beliefs" pages have.)
To be clear: much of your criticism is constructive criticism, possibly valid. Another significant portion is neither constructive nor valid. But regardless of whether it's valid or not, you do not want to be rude or confrontational about it. If your intent is to improve LW/MIRI, then you want to phrase your criticisms in a way that makes them pleasant to engage with. From what I've been able to tell based on your posts and comments, both here and elsewhere, arguing with you is generally not a fun thing to do. Do you think people will be more receptive to stuff that's phrased aggressively, or less receptive? I have very little to say on the object level in response to your concerns. However, if your goal is to foster improvement, then it's probably a good idea to present the objections without the snideness. It makes it a lot more comfortable for both sides of the discussion if you do so.
You said that engaging in discussion with representatives of LW/MIRI is stressful for you. It doesn't have to be.
There is one about Stephen J. Gould, but I don't remember any other.
Ahem...Philosophy, a Diseased Discipline.
I would not characterize that as a post about why philosophy "sucks", though... more a post on its shortcomings and how they might be overcome. Maybe we're just different in the way we interpret words, but in my view, "sucks" is connotatively a lot worse than "diseased", because calling something "diseased" implies that there's a "cure", whereas "sucks" just... sucks.
(Edit: Huh. This comment seems to be getting pretty steadily downvoted. Is there something people didn't like about it?)
I didn't downvote, but I'll venture a guess:
You pattern-matched to "commenter refused to update on counterexample and is now in denial". Also, people probably don't want to end up in a dead-end argument about definitions of words.
Perhaps a better way would have been to keep the eye on the ball: never mind what "sucks" does or doesn't mean, the original point of saying "we don't have an X sucks page" was that we don't have an axe to grind against any group of people in particular and keep attacking them in a mean-spirited ways that don't promote good discussion. It would take thin skin indeed to feel personally attacked if you happen to work in philosophy and read that Diseased Discipline article. Nor would you feel, after browsing LW for a while, that the people behind it are devoting serious energy to coming up with bad things to say about you. This I think remains true even if we were to agree that we do have a couple "X sucks" pages.
Yes, my first encounter with you was when I bashed you for your unfair criticism of Rationalwiki and your unfair support of Eliezer Yudkowsky, yet somehow you failed to call me a brainwashed cultist of Rationalwiki, and you failed to launch a website devoted on how much your bashing of Rationalwiki is justified because they're horrible cultist people out to brainwash you.
Oh, I've actually wondered occassionally whether me bashing you for an Eliezer fanboy drove you to try to prove how much of an Eliezer fanboy you weren't, and so decided to launch your rabid obsession against him. But even if that's the case, I don't confuse causality with moral blame; reasonable people wouldn't attack third parties for any injustice I performed against them, they'd be angry against me alone -- and you never mentioned me once in all your absurd unjust diatribes against Lesswrong and MIRI.
So I think that this is just justification after the fact to blame your attack on someone acting in defense. I've only started commenting against you (in support of LessWrong/MIRI, as opposed to in my defense of Rationalwiki) after dozens of mockeries and other attacks by you against the forum, so I don't think you can believably claim me as a significant 'cause' in the manner you imply.