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Lumifer comments on Letting it go: when you shouldn't respond to someone who is wrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (34)
/waves :-D
First, it's your choice. If you choose to spend your time this way, don't complain. Second, I see the labour theory of value raising its head again :-)
All in all, it seems you just don't like when people do not agree with you. Sorry about that.
Request denied.
Your half a second of thought is unlikely to be worth as much as two hours of my time. You're not that brilliant.
I don't like it when people disagree. I get over it when I'm proven wrong.
There is an obvious counter which I'll skip, but the point isn't that I'm not that brilliant -- the point is that I'm different from you.
That's fine, but why should your preference impose obligations on other people?
Which is useful in finding logical flaws and glaring oversights. If I am doing factual research, your differences must be pure magic to make half a second of your time worth as much as two hours of mine. Unless you're able to rattle off a dozen citations at the drop of a hat, which is rather improbable.
My preference alone doesn't.
I'd like to find a community in which people actually try to get the right answers. This takes effort. I have been trying to put forth that effort. I want to ensure that others do the same. I've seen very good examples and some that aren't so good.
I am not interested in comparing the worth of time. If you feel my comments are factually wrong, I always welcome corrections as being wrong (and finding out about it) is actually more useful than being right.
Posting something and being shown that it's wrong is an effective method of updating your worldview.
Provided they exist. A lot of times the right answer is "it depends". Rationality has its own uncanny valley, be careful not to end up there.
My initial reading of this is that you are claiming a desire to have other people perform, for you, a service which you do not agree to perform for them (providing corrections, as opposed to simply contradicting the person). Is that an incorrect interpretation of your intent?
I wish to properly understand your point of view here, because it feels like defecting (or stating an intention to do so) in a prisoner's dilemma where the benefit of mutual cooperation is that everybody learns more and that discussions are furthered without so much digression. We know what happens in a PD where one side is expected to defect, so - if you do, in fact, welcome factual corrections - why would you indicate an intention to do so? I expect that's not actually your intention but do not see a more charitable explanation for your behavior.
If you think somebody is wrong on the Internet, and you can't be bothered to actually look up why and make a strong claim to their wrongness, why mention it at all? What utility does that provide, and is it a net positive?
Yes, incorrect. I don't think I have a habit of saying "You're wrong", full stop. Normally I either explain why do I think so or at least point to relevant reasons. Now, offering corrections is a bit of a different matter as this is easy to do only if the disagreement is free-standing, so to say, that is, sufficiently isolated from the rest of the argument. Usually that is not the case and (all IMHO, of course) the adjustments need to be multiple and done at a lower level which leads to a whole cascade of consequences.
However my desires in this respect are quite symmetric -- I do not expect other people to write out full analyses of my errors or provide solutions. "X is not true because of Y and Z" is all I hope to get.
I don't think that the PD is a good framework for the great majority of forum discussions.
What you are assuming isn't true. I am generally bothered enough to look up why. Even though I may not write a wall of text about it, my opinions have reasons for existing -- this is easy enough to check by continuing the conversation and digging deeper.
I have consciously avoided looking up what other stuff you've posted on to know whether you personally have any commenting habits I do or don't approve of (though I did notice your name at top of the 30 day contributor list, so obviously many people approve of your writing). I don't know whether you have a habit of just saying "you're wrong" with no justification or explanation. Nor do I know (or have any way of knowing, except possibly as a lower bound) how often or to what degree you look things up before commenting (and I'm aware of the fact that I'm not looking up your comment history here; but I am trying to minimize bias. Not sure if I'm doing it right, of course).
The fact that you chose to engage with the OP on the subject implied a defensiveness towards the behavior of writing unexplained and unsupported contradictory posts. That may be a completely off-base interpretation of your comments, but the fact that you didn't address claims such as spending "a half second" [to come up with a response] suggested that you did not, in practice, look up or provide explanations / references. This influenced my view of what you wrote in the comment I replied to.
I am fully in favor of the position you advocate in the comment I'm replying to now. I agree that PD wasn't a proper analogy (among other problems, the cost weightings don't match a classic PD because mutual cooperation is, in many ways, better than being the defector while the other party cooperates; there's also the fact that "the other party" is an entire body of people rather than an individual) but didn't come up with a better way to point out what looked like a failure of symmetry that produces greater personal utility at the cost of collective utility.
Well, actually no. The reason I chose to engage with the OP is that I had a brief comment exchange with the OP a couple of days before his post and to me his post was recognizable as an extended whine about that exchange and so, me.
Sorry, are you seeking to correct my mistaken impression, or was "implied" just a poor word choice? "Suggested" may have been better; I didn't mean to indicate a high-confidence conclusion but rather that it was the impression I got at the time. Your explanation makes sense but it wasn't apparent to me from your and the OP's comments in this thread alone, and I didn't know anything about your past except that there probably was history between you.
I'm trying to learn how to signal the actual degree to which I support a statement. I can't tell if you're saying that "no, it doesn't imply that" (presumably using "imply" in the logical, "A implies B" sense), which would mean I screwed up by using the word "imply" where I didn't mean to indicate a strong conclusion. Alternatively you may have just meant "no, that conclusion is incorrect" (in which case I would have omitted the first sentence, but that could be stylistic choice).