There is something weird about that - like to want to take on a big project and make a major difference for the world but also do less work in looking at the alternatives than I’ve done when shopping for small kitchen appliances.
You’ve repeatedly tried to jump on a bandwagon (align yourself with my tribe) to attack people when I write criticism. It’s a pattern that I dislike. I don’t want you to be mean to people I criticize, make them feel worse, make it harder for them, and make them feel ganged up on. And I don’t want to be under pressure to disown and contradict your comments (which I’ve done sometimes – I quote an example below from this topic) rather than ignore them, nor do I want to be pressured to meta discuss them like this.
Partly, you’re sucking up to me. Partly, you’re trying to join arguments where you already know what my conclusion is so you can be on the right side. You wait until my opinion/conclusion is clear enough and then try to say that. That’s especially convenient when you didn’t say much, if anything, earlier in the conversation, so you can just open with my opinion (or compatible/agreeing stuff) and not have to try to make it fit with some previously expressed opinion of yours. It’s also a way to not need to be able to argue your claims yourself because you’re just tacking on some extra stuff and you expect that I’ll argue the main issues adequately.
When I wrote:
No, he didn’t try to research others and make that comparison.
I was correcting you. That was something that was already covered in the conversation, and you were apparently not paying attention and getting stuff wrong. That was pushback on your post. It was a way of distancing from you, not agreeing with you. But you tried to reframe it and proceed like we’re agreeing and teaming up.
Also specifically saying he manages his life worse than you shop for small kitchen appliances is a mean social attack. What I said above would apply even without that specific jab. But that particular jab is particularly mean and social. And it’s also dishonest. It’s trying to suggest that Andy is so bad at life that he’s worse at the important stuff than Justin is when not really trying at small stuff. But Justin mismanages plenty of stuff in his life too, especially the big picture stuff (and meanwhile I’m sure Andy does fine at some local optima details like some of his comparison shopping).
I think you ought to work more on rational, constructive, productive self-criticism before unleashing your attack-criticism on others. Focus on your own learning and figure out how to be nice to yourself.
[quote=“Elliot, post:76, topic:329, full:true”]
I was thinking about and responding to different things in the two quotes and wasn’t self-aware enough to notice that they literally contradicted.
As post-mortem:
For the first quote I was thinking about the marketing materials. Yes, I completely ignored the SENS flaws in creating the marketing materials rather than make a plan to address the SENS flaws with the marketing materials.
For the second quote I was thinking about my view of SENS itself. Calling the SENS flaws “ignorable” somewhat overstates my position there because there are conditions under which I explicitly thought I would not ignore them.
I don’t know how to productively continue either. The contradiction occurred in two replies I kept short and relatively simple. I don’t think I could solve this problem with shorter/simpler posts and still be productive.
Intimidated might not be the right way for me to feel / think about the unbounded category. But I think my intuition was correct about it not being a good idea for me to post in the unbounded category.
Another way to think of it is that this is a reason you should be posting in the unbounded category.
You managed to contradict yourself in two short posts that were around one hour apart from each other (I think less than an hour).
You got this mistake pointed out to you, and your response seems to be to say that this is an example that shows you were right about it not being a good idea for you to post in unbounded.
But you are making these kinds of errors whether or not you post in unbounded.
Posting in “friendly” just makes it harder for other people to engage with you and deal with your errors because they have to be more careful about how they point out their errors and what they bring up.
It is OK to point out actual contradictions in people’s arguments in “friendly”. So posting there wouldn’t have stopped this kind of error from being pointed out.
The thing I try to be careful with in “friendly” is stuff like pointing out ongoing patterns of behaviour, which is a more meta issue.
So posting in “friendly” might protect you from certain kinds of criticism. But it actually makes it harder for other people to engage with you at all, since you make these kinds of errors as a pattern, and it is hard to figure out how to deal with that without bringing in unwanted meta.
Yes, I think you are right. My apologies for bringing that sort of stuff to the forum.
I hadn’t thought of it like that. I was thinking more like:
Friendly = Beginner
Unbounded = Advanced
Not exactly, but that’s the general idea I had.
I think I’ve adopted some anti-criticism automated policies.
I think many anti-criticism policies apply where I don’t already know how to implement a solution with no downsides compared to what I was doing or going to do.