adifferentface — LessWrong

LESSWRONG
LW

I endorse this, while still considering it important that criticism be given if warranted. As always, and unfortunately, there is less to say to someone on an issue where we already agree.

I have seen a great deal of the tumblr commentary, and commentary elsewhere, and had seen it before writing my comment. I agree much of it was extremely vicious, and perhaps there is worse than the "he should kill himself" one which I have not seen. This changes nothing about the likely consequences of Duncan's snark. It makes that snark more forgivable, certainly; I don't think Duncan is a bad person for responding to attacks with moderate snark. But I do nevertheless think that said snark is harmful, and since Duncan is a person who I respect, I think it worth my time to suggest this to him.

The majority of my post consisted of specific empirical predictions which were not about the contents of your head. Whether I am mistaken about why you are doing what you're doing changes nothing about what the effects of your behaviour are likely to be. To the extent it was about the contents of your head it was addressing a conflict I perceived between the likely outcomes of your behavior and the goals you have elsewhere explicitly given for that behaviour. I concede that if in fact you intend the consequences I predict above then there is no point in my having written them down. Otherwise, I disagree that this is something I... (read more)

Given this comment, I guess I should actually bother to write up my opinion on the callout aspect of your post, which is this:

The callout aspect of your post is bad, and with moderately high confidence will work against your explicitly stated goals.

I basically endorse habryka's comment here and Kaj_Sotala's here, but to make specific predictions:

This will not make most people significantly more reflective.
This kind of callout will not discourage trolls, that is, people who are being intentionally callous and who see themselves as mocking you and/or rationalists in general. I expect instead it will encourage them.
This may discourage non-troll people who have a viscerally negative reaction which they can't put into

... (read 789 more words →)

It doesn't work. It just gives "unknown error". Trying to register the account gave "internal server error".

This was roughly my ex ante analysis.

That's me! Username difference because I can't register the handle I used there over here at the moment.

Thanks for the kudos. I do have another handle, though I'm going to continue not to associate these two.

I also think I got things about right, but I think anyone else taking an outside view would've expected roughly the same thing. I'm now noticing that in fact this post doesn't give me enough information to assess how accurate my specific predictions were: this list of advice is suggestive but mostly not actually descriptive of what outcomes were not achieved as much as hoped, and how. I get the impression it's mostly just a sort of failure to coalesce, which isn't quite the outcome I expected but is not that far off from "someone will [...] fail to keep up with their chores".