What makes you think I didn't notice what Lumifer's argument was actually about?

you're not actually being a mature, responsible person here

I suggest that your assessment of that is strongly coloured by your completely incorrect characterization of the rest of the thread. You've already issued one correction -- indeed, my first response to Lumifer was not the post-hoc prediction you said it was (which would indeed have been inconsistent with my stated opinions). Here are some more. I didn't call Lumifer out; dxu did, my entry to the thread was an attempt to correct a misunderstanding. Given that I didn't start the thread, I'm not sure how I could possibly "admit that the thread was" anything.

you chose to insert a parting shot

I explained why I don't want to argue about it any more. I'm not sure exactly what you consider immature or irresponsible about that.

The other half of Lumifer's commentary, attempting to explain what I dislike about his posting style, is so far as I can tell quite badly wrong, but I don't think it would be productive to argue it further. (It very rarely is after one party has decided to go full Bulver on the other.)

You should notice now that what he was interpreting you as saying isn't what you were intending to convey, as demonstrated by the fact that you felt a need to clarify; likewise, by the fact that you didn't notice what his argument was actually about, you were likewise not getting what he was trying to communicate.

Your wounds here are, as Lumifer might put it, self-inflicted. And accusing the other party of going "full Bulver" isn't exactly conducive to the sort of respectful discussion you claim to want to reify here, which is really just a subset of the overall tone of discussion. You called Lumifer out, and, by my reckoning, have more or less admitted that the thread was at least in part a response to him and his style of commentary. More, for somebody who considers it incredibly rude and status-gamey to make predictions about people, your first response to Lumifer was a post-hoc prediction that he'd be the one to respond. Given that you regard such behavior as a status play, I can't help but interpret this entire bloody discussion in that framework. [ETA: Correction: It was Villiam who did the above.]

You're playing at being the mature, responsible person, telling somebody who is ill-behaved that their behavior is problematic. But you're not actually being a mature, responsible person here, as evidenced by the fact that you chose to insert a parting shot in your "I don't want to argue about this anymore."

If you don't want to argue about it anymore, stop bloody arguing, and ignore the need to inject attacks in your closing statement.

Not necessarily either, of course, but in practice it's probably easier for you to learn that New Englanders may avoid eye contact even if they are friendly than for half the population of New England to change their habits.

You miss my point. Rudeness is culturally contextual. You're insisting, here, that your social mores take precedent. It's entirely possible they're the majority mores, but Lumifer's overall positive karma should be taken as evidence against that.

Lumifer generally does not address the entirety of the comment, instead selectively quoting several sentences from various points in the comment and then snarking at those.

There is a reason for that. Addressing the entirety of the comment usually requires that your answer be longer than the comment you're replying to. That leads to large walls'o'text of fisking very very quickly and the whole thing implodes shortly afterwards.

In my experience to keep a manageable conversation going for more than a couple of rounds you need to severely prune the topics and keep the whole thing on a (possibly meandering) track. Of course both sides can/should do this: I don't expect that every point I raised will be addressed in the reply. As to snarking, well... :-)

Re EDIT:

Snarky one-liner? Check.

I like snarky one-liners.

Does not actually address the main point? Check.

Nope. It actually addresses the main point of the post it's replying to.

More condescending than informative? Check.

Not condescending. Snarky (see above). Condescending would have been "Don't worry your pretty little head about it".

perhaps (as it seemed to me) there wasn't a way of making my point clearly and correctly without too much wall-o'-text

In such situations I usually choose to not say anything and let it go.

When both of your options lose, the only way to win is not to play :-)

Result: some combination of boring defensive writing, and reduced participation (hence, less interesting stuff on LW).

Since we've been talking about trade-offs, let me point out that there is one here, too. Let's imagine a wonderful world where people like me are absent and everyone is very nice, highly supportive and full of praise. Gold stars for everyone! What kind of writing would you expect to get?

My cynical side says that you will get a whole lot of badly written, unfocused, lazy, vague, incoherent crap. You might well get increased participation because yay praise and hugs for little effort, but thoughtful people would leave, for obvious reasons. That doesn't look like a good outcome.

As usual, balance is important. You want to prune (and disincentivise) crap and you want to promote (and incentivise) interesting, insightful writing. The exact location of the proper balancing point is, of course, debatable :-)

One more thing -- it might be helpful to think of LW as an ecosystem. An ecosystem likes and need diversity. That, in turn, implies that LW needs different kinds of people who will fill different roles. Some people (like me) will snap and bite. Some people will nurture and grow. Some people will dump the minutiae of their daily lives onto LW. Some people will think for a year and then make a single post. Some people are interested in neural nets, some are interested in ponies, some are interested in how to lose weight and pick up girls, and some are interested in how to make sure LW doesn't become an example of Lotka-Volterra equations.

Monocultures are bad, mmkay?

I'm pretty sure [...]

dxu, would you care to weigh in?

That's a rather weak claim.

The options I had, writing that sentence, were: obviously-too-strong claim; obviously-too-weak claim; absurdly fussily qualified and quantified claim. None of them was perfect, so I chose the one that looked least bad to me.

this is an impolite thing to say

That's OK, I have thick skin and enough self-reflection capability :-)

I am not really sure whether you actually have no idea what "nice" means

The problem is that I have more than one idea :-) "Nice" corresponds to a cluster of meanings -- there is e.g. "pleasant", but there is also "mild", "inoffensive", "bland". I suspect that my own use of the word "nice" is associated with, um, underperformance, I guess? Something could have been great, amazing, wonderful, but it didn't make it, however it managed to avoid being a fail, too, so it's... nice. Damning with faint praise kind of thing.

Here, though, I think you mean things like "don't be an asshole" and "cooperate, praise, support". But when I asked "who determines", the accent was on who (in the spirit of "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything").

One of the problems with "when I see a weakness, I must attack immediately" style of communication is that is makes it impossible to discuss issues which we cannot sufficiently exactly express yet

No, I don't think so. Incoherence is a weakness, not uncertainty. And in the case of uncertainty, attempts to "harden up" the fuzziness, establish bounds, etc. are not attacks but rather attempts at clarification.

Politeness tries to achieve its goal by reducing personal involvement.

Yes, that's a good way to express it, though I still doubt that ultimately-polite people are all fungible. Politeness is just a form, there is still non-fungible content inside it.

Niceness assumes that you care about the other person, as a person

I would describe that as "caring" and I think that's quite different from "being nice to".

"Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?"

-- David Chalmers

These questions may be a product of conceptual confusion, but they don't seem that way to me. Perhaps I am confused in the same way.

If you look up mainstream news article written back then, you'll notice that people were indeed concerned. Also, maybe it's a coincidence, but The Matrix movie, which has AI uprising as it's main premise, came out two years later.

The difference is that in 1997 there weren't AI-risk organizations ready to capitalize on these concerns.