A lot of the discussion on this post ended up being about LessWrong norms. I've moved that particular thread over to the comments here, and left a comment there pointing over here.
(Some of those comments, including the initial one, were object-level relevant to this post. I apologize for moving all of them indiscriminately. Our comment-moving-features are a bit janky and it's easier to move an entire thread than individual subthreads. I also apologize for breaking a lot of the comment-permalinks in that thread, and we'll look into fixing those. Meanwhile, you can actually still hover-over the comments in question on LW to see a preview of the comment, and you can also copy the comment-hash from the link and apply it to the new post to get a working link)
Some thoughts.
I feel like Said is either expressing himself poorly here, or being unreasonable. After all, the logical conclusion of this would be that people can DDoS an author by spamming them with bad faith requests for clarification.
However I do think there is a law in this vein, something more subtle, more nuanced, a lot harder to define. And its statement is something like:
In order for a space to have good epistemics, here defined as something like "keep out woo, charlatans, cranks, etc", that space must have certain norms around discourse. These norms can be formulated many different ways, but at their core they insist that authors have an obligation to respond to questions which have standing and warrant.
Standing means that:
There are multiple ways to establish standing. The most obvious is to be well respected, so that when you say something people have the prior that it is important. Another way to establish standing is to write your comment or question excellently, as a costly signal that this is not low-effort critique or Paul Graham's infamous "middlebrow dismissal".
Warrant means that:
There are either commonly assumed or clearly articulated reasons for asking this question. We are not privileging the hypothesis without justification.
These reasons are more or less accepted by the audience.
Questions & comments lacking either standing or warrant can be dismissed, in fact the author does not even have to respond to them. In practice the determination of standing and warrant is made by the author, unless something seems worthy enough that their ignoring it is conspicuous.
I think you would be hard pressed to argue to me in seriousness that academics do not claim to have norms that peoples beliefs are open to challenge from anyone who has standing and warrant. I would argue that the historical LessWrong absolutely had implicit norms of this type. Moreover, EY himself has written about insufficient obligation to respond as a major bug in how we do intellectual communication.