gjm comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - LessWrong

31 Post author: JonahSinick 04 May 2015 05:11AM

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Comment author: Mirzhan_Irkegulov 06 May 2015 09:38:08PM *  4 points [-]

Strip Lumifer of all the hostility, and he's right. Your comments are unpleasant to read. You said in a comment below, that certain comments should be against community norms and commenters should be “inquisitive and open-minded rather than combative and dismissive”. First of all, commenters don't owe you to be anyone and they would rightly complain. Second, I would rather have your comment to be against community norms.

Translate your high-brow rhetoric, and you get “I'm so much smarter than you. You need to be grateful that I'm writing these articles and comments for you. When my arguments are weak, you should steelman them yourself. You should agree with me, otherwise I'll deem your criticism non-constructive, and you non-inquisitive and not having an open mind. I'm wasting time on you and could be doing better things than talking to worms like you. But hey, I'm so much better than you, that exactly because of that I condenscend to you, because I'm Jesus and I love you. But I spent 15 years loving people and they didn't love me in return, these ungrateful swines.”

I don't care that you don't intend to seem like that. Intentions are inside your mind, appearances are what people actually see.

I hear lots of times that LW is a hostile place with terrible community tendencies for social interactions. I personally dislike lots of things about LW and would want it to improve. But you're the first person, whose comments were intensely unpleasant to read. Even neoreactionaries are nicer people.

Your comments in this thread are wrong on so many levels regardless of your position on mathematical ability. Imagine Yudkowsky going on long arguments in comment section about how people don't understand him, and how he loves them, and how he's so much smarter than them — there would be no LessWrong community.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 08 May 2015 12:42:53PM *  3 points [-]

First of all, commenters don't owe you to be anyone and they would rightly complain.

This sounds like a deontological argument. You're talking about responsibilities (or lack thereof) and rights.

It's possible that Jonah is operating within a consequentialist framework... that is, he believes that a culture of not griping about well written and informative posts (like his) will lead to the valuable consequence of more such posts being written. (By delivering social punishment, in the form of complaints, to people who make quality LW contributions, one works against the public good of quality LW contributions.)

It's also possible that if Jonah adjusts his tone, it will could lead to positive consequences like people not getting annoyed by the feeling that he is lording it over them or whatever. It doesn't annoy me much when Jonah lets me know that he's an expert; I shrug and await the next post in his sequence; but I recognize that others may feel differently.

Personally, I think both these hypotheses are true.