Thank you all for your responses, I really appreciated them. Your perspectives make more sense to me now, though I have to say I still feel really confused.
[Following comment not exhaustively responding to everything you said.]
I hadn’t intended to communicate in my first comment that Mark deliberately intended to violate the forum guidelines, but that he deliberately decided against being kind and curious. (Thank you for pointing that out, I did not think of the alternative reading.)
I didn’t provide any evidence for this because I thought Mark said this very explicitly at the start of his post:
To play by gentlemans rules is to their advantage—curtailing the tools in at my disposal to makes bullshit as costly as possible.
I acknowledge there are some negative costs to this (e.g. polluting the information commons with avoidable conflict), and good people can disagree about if the tradeoff is worth it. But I believe it is.
Gentleman’s rules usually include things like being kind and curious I would guess, and Mark says explicitly that he ignores them because the tradeoff is worth it to him. I don’t understand how these lines can be interpreted in any other way, this seems like the literal reading to me.
I have to admit that even after all your kind elaborate explanations I struggle to understand how anything in the section ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ could be read as tongue-in-cheek, as it reads very openly hostile to me (...it’s right there in the title?) .
I don’t think it is that unlikely that interviewees on the 80k podcast would respond to a kind thoughtful critique on the EA Forum. That said, this is not just about Tristan, but everyone who might disagree with Mark, as the ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ section made me doubt they would be treated with curiosity and kindness.
I will take from this that people can have very different interpretations of the same content, even if I think the content is is very explicit and straightforward.
Thank you all for your responses, I really appreciated them. Your perspectives make more sense to me now, though I have to say I still feel really confused.
[Following comment not exhaustively responding to everything you said.]
I hadn’t intended to communicate in my first comment that Mark deliberately intended to violate the forum guidelines, but that he deliberately decided against being kind and curious. (Thank you for pointing that out, I did not think of the alternative reading.) I didn’t provide any evidence for this because I thought Mark said this very explicitly at the start of his post:
Gentleman’s rules usually include things like being kind and curious I would guess, and Mark says explicitly that he ignores them because the tradeoff is worth it to him. I don’t understand how these lines can be interpreted in any other way, this seems like the literal reading to me.
I have to admit that even after all your kind elaborate explanations I struggle to understand how anything in the section ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ could be read as tongue-in-cheek, as it reads very openly hostile to me (...it’s right there in the title?) .
I don’t think it is that unlikely that interviewees on the 80k podcast would respond to a kind thoughtful critique on the EA Forum. That said, this is not just about Tristan, but everyone who might disagree with Mark, as the ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ section made me doubt they would be treated with curiosity and kindness.
I will take from this that people can have very different interpretations of the same content, even if I think the content is is very explicit and straightforward.