I’ll be honest, I’m probably not going to go back through all of the quotations now and give the separate posts they come from. Karnofsky did put the whole series into a single pdf which can function as a single source (but as I say, I haven’t gone through again and checked myself).
I do recognize the bit you are quoting though—yes that is indeed where I got my quotations for that part from—and I did think a bit the issue you are bringing up. To me, this seems like a fair paraphrase/description of Karnofsky in that section:
a) He’s developed a mindset in which he critically examines things like this with as much rigour as possible;
and
b) He has made a lot of investment in examining this thesis.
So it seemed—and still seems—to me that he is implying that he has invested a lot of time in critically examining this thesis with as much as rigour as possible.
However, I would not have used the specific phrasing that JoshuaBlake used. i.e. I deliberately did not say something like ’Karnofsky claims tohave written these posts with as much rigour as possible”. So I do think that one could try to give him the benefit of the doubt and say something like:
‘Although he spent a lot of time examining the thesis with as much rigor as possible, it does not necessarily follow that he wrote the posts in a way that shows that. So criticising the writing in the posts is kind of an unfair way to attack his use of rigour.‘
But I think to me this just seemed like I would be trying a bit too hard to avoid criticising him. This comes back to some of my points in my post: i.e. I am suggesting that his posts are not written in a way that invites clear criticism, despite his claim that his is one of his main intentions and I suggest that Karnofsky’s rhetorical style aims for the best of both worlds: He wants his readers to think both that he has thought about this very rigorously and critically for a long time but also—wherever it seems vague or wrong—to give him the benefit of the doubt and say ‘well it was never meant to be taken too seriously or to be 100% rigorous, they’re just blog posts etc.’.
(Just a note: Of course you are free to go into more detail in comments but I’m not sure I have much bandwidth to devote to writing long replies.)
I appreciate the comment.
I’ll be honest, I’m probably not going to go back through all of the quotations now and give the separate posts they come from. Karnofsky did put the whole series into a single pdf which can function as a single source (but as I say, I haven’t gone through again and checked myself).
I do recognize the bit you are quoting though—yes that is indeed where I got my quotations for that part from—and I did think a bit the issue you are bringing up. To me, this seems like a fair paraphrase/description of Karnofsky in that section:
a) He’s developed a mindset in which he critically examines things like this with as much rigour as possible;
and
b) He has made a lot of investment in examining this thesis.
So it seemed—and still seems—to me that he is implying that he has invested a lot of time in critically examining this thesis with as much as rigour as possible.
However, I would not have used the specific phrasing that JoshuaBlake used. i.e. I deliberately did not say something like ’Karnofsky claims to have written these posts with as much rigour as possible”. So I do think that one could try to give him the benefit of the doubt and say something like:
‘Although he spent a lot of time examining the thesis with as much rigor as possible, it does not necessarily follow that he wrote the posts in a way that shows that. So criticising the writing in the posts is kind of an unfair way to attack his use of rigour.‘
But I think to me this just seemed like I would be trying a bit too hard to avoid criticising him. This comes back to some of my points in my post: i.e. I am suggesting that his posts are not written in a way that invites clear criticism, despite his claim that his is one of his main intentions and I suggest that Karnofsky’s rhetorical style aims for the best of both worlds: He wants his readers to think both that he has thought about this very rigorously and critically for a long time but also—wherever it seems vague or wrong—to give him the benefit of the doubt and say ‘well it was never meant to be taken too seriously or to be 100% rigorous, they’re just blog posts etc.’.
(Just a note: Of course you are free to go into more detail in comments but I’m not sure I have much bandwidth to devote to writing long replies.)