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Jiro comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - LessWrong
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Because that's what it means for a discussion to be two way. People criticize you. That's how it works.
I doubt it, because that would imply that even if you're trying to teach someone, you never try to dispel any misconceptions, correct errors, etc. You probably don't think of those as "being skeptical of the value of an author's writing", but in fact, that's what it is. Well, in a two way discussion, this is going to be happening in both directions, and just like you do it to other people, other people will do it to you.
Has this been your experience in real life interactions? LW is virtually the only context in which I've seen this dynamic as a community norm. :-)
Some reasons why I might engage somebody:
All of these things are signals of respect. What I'm puzzled by is the fact that some LWers who engage with me don't seem to respect me in the way that I respect them (as shown by my taking time to communicate with them when the time could be spent in other ways!). I feel like "If you don't respect me, why are you talking to me at all? Why don't you instead spend time talking with people who you do respect?"
Can you help me understand what's going on here?
The ultimate problem is that you seem to have a double standard, and this is an example of it. If you taking time to communicate with them counts as a sign of you respecting them, then them taking the time to communicate with you should count as a sign of them respecting you. Just like the double standard where someone who criticizes you is "skeptical of the value of an author's writing" but when you do the same thing to other people, you're just correcting misconceptions and influencing the person's thinking. You're nobody special here, just like everyone else is nobody special. [1]
[1] There are some people, like Eliezer, who sometimes get treated as special. I don't agree at all with this.
Your comments have been giving me the sense that you don't respect me – have I been misreading you?
The thing is, most people on LW don't disagree for any specific reason like respect or wanting to correct misconceptions or whatever. Disagreement just happens to be the status quo here. I haven't worked out why people here like to disagree so much, even when there seems to be no benefit from doing so--but then again, humans aren't perfectly instrumentally rational, and perhaps LWers are less instrumentally rational than most. (We certainly do seem to have more people suffering from akrasia around here than most places, after all.) It's also possible that Lumifer and Vaniver are right, and that LW users are a conceited, contentious bunch that like to disagree to signal intelligence and/or gain karma. I know I've fallen victim to the urge to nitpick before, and so have many others here, including even prominent users like shminux. (Jiro, too, from my previous experience talking with him/her.) It's just nitpicking. Respect, for better or for worse, doesn't even really enter the equation.
For the record, however, I do respect your mathematical ability, and while I'm less confident about your metacognitive abilities, I think that if you've spent as much time pondering this subject as you claim--certainly a lot more time than most people around here have, probably--you have a reasonably good grasp on what you're talking about. Just don't expect most LWers to feel the same way.
I think you are too quick to take disagreement personally. Interpreting disagreement as lack of respect is an example of this.
I think it's more issues like tone, personally. (Particularly egregious are examples of "you are" statements, instead of "I feel" statements, which I've noticed many LWers seem really prone to making. It's a lot less pretentious-sounding when you prefix your statements with an "I feel" or "I think" or "in my opnion".)
You didn't answer my question: do you respect me? :-) You're not giving any positive feedback whatsoever. I don't care what you think of me, but it's reasonable for me to assume that you don't have any positive feelings toward me if you're not saying anything positive.
I respect you by my standards, but apparently not by your standards.
Based on JonahSinick's prior comments, his motivation for asking this question is pretty clear. You have already critiqued the thought process that made him think this question is necessary, to attack it again is almost double-counting. I think if you had answered the question directly the discussion would have a better chance of bootstrapping out of mutual unintelligibility. Then again, I mostly lurk and only rarely participate in internet debates so I don't feel I really understand how any given discussion strategy would actually play out. Also, I cheated, since Jonah already expressed a desire for a direct answer.