[yummyfajitas]

To repeat this idea with a different mood affiliation:

I have no idea what muslims truly believe and I don't even care too much. What I care about is the effects of their beliefs...Terrorism is an organic outgrowth from it. And it's just one of many...

I take it that if Donald Trump makes this claim, you'll support it?

[pron]

How are "muslims", over 1.5 billion people with wide ranging beliefs and practices analogous to one individual who leads a small group? If you were to apply this to a particular muslim with a following, who you believe has advanced particular beliefs with a negative effect, then the sentiment expressed by johann30 would make a lot of sense, and even the most heart-bleeding of liberals would agree.

I don't have enough information to agree or disagree with johann30 specific claim, and I can't comment to the negative effects he says he had witnessed on himself and others (all I know is that Yudkowsky is neither a philosopher nor an expert on the subject), but your analogy did not resemble his idea at all.

[dang]

Please stop trolling on HN.

[yummyfajitas]

Can you clarify what you mean by the word "trolling"? I'm honestly asking the question because I don't understand what you object to.

If I understand what the term means to you I can avoid that in the future.

[dang]

You've used a dismissive hand-wave ("mood affiliation") to reduce somebody's comment to something clearly provocative ("muslims... terrorism... Trump"), then alleged that the commenter must support the latter. Such a post is in effect just a delivery mechanism for the provocation, so I call it trolling. It's like reaching out and tweaking somebody's nose as you're talking—it doesn't much matter what point you happened to be arguing for at the time.

Your post (and you post a lot of these) takes the form of logically substituting one expression for an equivalent one, but that's not what you're doing at all—you're simply pretending to. Not even mathematical expressions can be substituted that way without careful proof that every step preserves the meaning, and natural language simply doesn't work this way to begin with. It isn't valid to rip something out of its context, do major surgeries on it, then fling it back with the claim that it's what the other is really saying. When the thing you're flinging back seems designed to be offensive, the likelihood that this is sincere communication, aiming at understanding, plummets.

Many of your recent comments seem crafted to be technically unimpeachable while still tweaking people's noses. I could be wrong about that and would prefer to be; it's hard to read intent. But the fact that they come across that way is already a problem. You'd contribute more of value if you sincerely, and not only technically, eliminated that element and sought neutral ground with others. Note that this doesn't entail changing your views, though it can involve making an assessment of how much the conversation can tolerate before it goes haywire, and calibrating accordingly. But that's part of civil discourse anyhow. It makes no sense to send messages with little chance of being received.

[yummyfajitas]

I didn't mean to imply that I really thought Johann30 supported Trump or islamophobia. Rather, I used that example because I thought it was such an extreme and obviously false example of similar logic ("I have no idea what X truly believe and I don't even care too much") leading to wrong results. I realize now that my last sentence could be misinterpreted as being literal rather than rhetorical with an obvious negative answer (as was intended by me).

And of course there is possibly a distinguishing principle that Johann30 used as an unstated premise - that's just a flaw of natural language. But I realize I could have been clearer in allowing for that possibility. I'll try to be more literal in the future.

I understand you want others to stop being provoked by my comments, but I can't really control that.

What is the concrete action you'd like me to take? Will being more literal and explicitly requesting the elucidation of unstated premises/stating that I obviously don't think the person believes the contradictory conclusion/etc be sufficient? Should I include an explicit disclaimer that I'm making an argument by contradiction? Or are arguments by contradiction now explicitly disallowed (only constructive logic, I guess)?

[scott_s]

You could create a neutral version of the claim:

I have no idea what X truly believe and I don't even care too much. What I care about is the effects of Y ... Z is an organic outgrowth from it. And it's just one of many...

Your claim is that if you substitute in any X, Y and Z (where X, Y and Z are consistent with each other), the statement is equivalent. You want the original poster to reply to this idea. Dan's point, which I agree with, is that putting in emotionally charged X, Y and Z is not civil, promotes emotional responses and is effectively trolling.

(I also happen to agree with Dan that the particular X, Y and Z matter, and the sentences are not necessarily logically equivalent with any X, Y and Z. But it's still possible to make the above argument without the emotional baggage. I understand it's a rhetorical technique to shock the reader into seeing what you perceive as sloppy thinking, but I think it is more likely to inflame and prevent discussion on the original topic.)

[yummyfajitas]

To make the argument the conclusion can't be neutral. It has to be definitively and obviously wrong. That's why I chose Trump and Islam - it's such a ridiculously wrong conclusion that I doubted anyone here could support it.

I agree that the particular X/etc sometimes matters. And a valid argument against mine would be to give a clear limiting principle (something unstated in the original post, but perhaps implicit?) that applies to the critique of less wrong but fails for Islam.

Pron kind of tried to do this - he said Johann30's argument can only apply to small groups and Islam is large (though where this large vs small distinction comes from is unstated).

To take a mathematical (and hopefully completely uncontroversial) example of this:

Fool: "The sum of IID random variables is gaussian. Therefore $Z"

Smartass: "Oh yeah? What about C/(1+x^2)? Your argument is invalid."

Fool: "Oops I meant IID random variables with finite variance, just thought that was implicit and obvious."

Of course, if Fool can't come up with that added clause then the Smartass has disproven him.