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entirelyuseless comments on Typical Sneer Fallacy - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: calef 01 September 2015 03:13AM

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Comment author: buybuydandavis 01 September 2015 03:58:19AM 6 points [-]

I suspect the anecdote about Eliezer only sidetracks your readers.

Typical Sneer Fallacy: When you ignore or are offended by criticism because you've mistakenly identified it as coming purely from sneer.

Hence the problem with sneer in actual criticism. Not that I'm opposed to sneering. Far from it. But you'd better be making solid points while you sneer. If you make a bunch of half ass points just to sneer, don't expect people to dig your one diamond out of that pile of crap. They will look elsewhere for criticism, if they're interested in it at all. And quite reasonably so.

EY writes:

But the thought that su3su2su1 could just walk through finding errors in every chapter is laughable, and since he's clearly making up most of it, you shouldn't be surprised that he's making up all of it. If somebody started posting a list of science errors by Scott Aaronson or Scott Alexander purporting to find errors in every post, I wouldn't expect to find even a single real one mixed in.

Yep. Don't expect to find diamonds in a pile of crap. Expect to find more crap.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 01 September 2015 02:17:37PM 0 points [-]

These seem like pretty good reasons not to sneer, whether or not your criticism is solid.