The main thing that pinged me about anoneaagain’s comment was that it’s saying things that aren’t true, and saying them in ways that aren’t epistemically cooperative, more so than that it’s merely unkind. If you’re going to assert ‘this person’s youtube videos are unsuccessful’, you should say what you mean by that and why you think it. If the thing you’re responding to is a long, skimmable 75-page post, you should make sure your readers didn’t miss the fact that the person you’re alluding to is a Computerphile contributor whose videos there tend to get hundreds of thousands of views, and you should say something about why that’s not relevant to your success metric (or to the broader goals LTFF should be focusing on).
Wink-and-nudge, connotation-based argument makes it hard to figure out what argument’s being made, which makes it hard to have a back-and-forth. If we strip aside the connotation, it’s harder to see what’s laughable about ideas like “it can be useful to send people books” or “it can be useful to send people books that aren’t textbooks, essay collections, or works of original fiction”. Likewise, it doesn’t seem silly to me for people with disabilities to work on EA projects, or to suggest that disability treatment could be relevant to some EA projects. But I have no idea where to go from there in responding to anoneaagain, because the comment’s argument structure is hidden.
The main thing that pinged me about anoneaagain’s comment was that it’s saying things that aren’t true, and saying them in ways that aren’t epistemically cooperative, more so than that it’s merely unkind. If you’re going to assert ‘this person’s youtube videos are unsuccessful’, you should say what you mean by that and why you think it. If the thing you’re responding to is a long, skimmable 75-page post, you should make sure your readers didn’t miss the fact that the person you’re alluding to is a Computerphile contributor whose videos there tend to get hundreds of thousands of views, and you should say something about why that’s not relevant to your success metric (or to the broader goals LTFF should be focusing on).
Wink-and-nudge, connotation-based argument makes it hard to figure out what argument’s being made, which makes it hard to have a back-and-forth. If we strip aside the connotation, it’s harder to see what’s laughable about ideas like “it can be useful to send people books” or “it can be useful to send people books that aren’t textbooks, essay collections, or works of original fiction”. Likewise, it doesn’t seem silly to me for people with disabilities to work on EA projects, or to suggest that disability treatment could be relevant to some EA projects. But I have no idea where to go from there in responding to anoneaagain, because the comment’s argument structure is hidden.