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gjm comments on How It Feels to Improve My Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think that's a fair criticism. But you're making it deep in a subthread that started with an entirely different and much less fair criticism of a different part of what he said.
From the outside, it looks to me as if you're looking more for a status-fight than for a real discussion with SIH. I find it unsurprising if he responds defensively.
(My perception could be dead wrong, of course. The possibility of such errors is, I take it, one reason why the conventions of polite discussion in many societies include measures to make things look less like status-fights.)
Being more explicit might have helped. I, and I'm guessing also SquirrelInHell, took you to be saying not "This may work well in some relatively simple and clear-cut domains, but in more complex ones it can cause trouble" (with which I guess SIH would have agreed) but something more like "Obviously you're using this heuristic in complex domains where it doesn't belong; how silly of you".
As for its application to my comment: your insertion of the word "complex" was 8 comments upthread and a major theme of the intervening discussion has been the possibility that you assumed SIH was intending to apply the "feels simple and elegant" heuristic to a wide range of complex human situations when in fact he was intending to apply it only to simpler situations more amenable to first-principles analysis. So I really don't think it is reasonable for you to suggest that when you now say (without any qualification as to complexity) "if you do X you are making a mistake and using a bad heuristic", I should just assume you are only referring to the class of situations in which, so far as I can tell, we all agree that doing X is likely to be a bad idea.
I agree 100% that I'm not giving a "justification why the heuristic of seeing those things as a sign of increased rationality is useful".
My answer is that I never intended for what I'm writing to be useful in this way.
I think it becomes anti-useful if you use it as a set of pointers about what is more "rational".
I indicated this much in my "notes", as clearly as I could.
If you look at this thread you see that the first post I wrote was explicitely thanking him and far away from status-fight. With increased attempts of him to dodge debate, I used more strong language.
If that's the case than SIH should be criticized for not making it clear in his OP that he talks about simple situations. For me treating the OP as being about complex situations and noting it explicitely, is completely reasonable.
If he writes a vague post that doesn't make it clear whether he means complex or simply domains it's very reasonable for me to say: "I'm assuming you mean complex domains, and here's what follows from that..." That brings him in a discussion to clarify what he means if the assumption doesn't apply. I'm bringing the discussion forward by making that assumption. In this case he instead tried to dodge the debate.
[Before I say anything else, an entirely separate thing: I have consistently been typing your name as "ChristianKI" when in fact it's "ChristianKl" (the two are pixel-for-pixel identical on my screen, but others using different fonts may see the difference -- the wrong one has a capital eye at the end, the right one a lowercase ell). My apologies for getting your name wrong.]
OK, I agree. I'd either not read that one, or forgotten it (it was in a separate thread starting from a different top-level comment on SIH's post).
Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't look like an accurate description. The actual sequence appears to be (times as displayed to me by LW -- I'm not sure what it does about timezones):
"Seems" is a word to make the statement less strong.
The statement provides two productive ways for the discussion to continue:
a) He says that I misunderstand that he advocates hedgehog-style thinking. b) He defends hedgehog-style thinking as good.
Both of those alternatives lead the discussion to a more substantive place that's less vague. Not wanting to take either of those positions but instead criticizing the fact that there's an assumption is evasive.
You are certainly missing sent direct messages started by SIH.
Obviously I can't comment on any private messages between the two of you.