this post and here

For what it's worth, as an outsider to this conversation who nonetheless has experience engaging in very long arguments with Said that ultimately went nowhere, it seems to me that Said was... straightforwardly correct in both of these instances. 

The same way he was straightforwardly correct when pointing out the applause lights and anti-epistemology proponents of Circling were engaging in here, when bringing attention to the way Duncan Sabien's proposed assumption of good faith contradicts LW culture here, when asking for examples so the author can justify why their proposed insight actually reflects something meaningful in the territory as opposed to self-wankery, and in a countless number of other such instances.

And when I say "straightforwardly correct," I'm not just referring to the object-level, although that is of course the most important part. I'm also referring to the rhetoric he employed (i.e., none) and the way he asked his questions. I think saying, "Do you have any examples to illustrate what you mean by this word?" is the perfect question to ask when you believe an author is writing up applause light after applause light, and this should be bloody damn obvious to anyone who has ever read the Sequences. And the fact this was not the universal reaction of every single LW regular when these events passed reflects very poorly on this community (and especially on some of the actual mods who were involved in those messes).

how interacting with you was stressful

I get that interacting with Said, when you are an author, can be stressful. And just based on priors, the fact that this one commenter has pissed off many (dozens???) of popular LW post authors and even caused a lot of them to leave the site entirely, would make me very likely to think he was wrong and a useless nuisance weighing down the rationality of this site.

But I'm not just operating on priors. I see example after example after example of him asking "What do you mean by this?" or saying "This doesn't make any sense," and the authors of posts crumbling in response, unable to muster up at even the most basic level any coherent logical explanation of their own language. It's a strong prior, the one I wrote up above. But even the strongest of priors can wilt under a mountain of evidence, and I have been convinced by a mountain of evidence that the prior is wrong.

you deliver it in a way that is difficult to engage with because of your confrontational style and frequent refusal to engage with others' ideas in good faith

It sure would be... nice if every piece of disagreement from the Achmiz side of the aisle^[1] was written in the @Zack_M_Davis style of hyperlinking everything and typing up hundreds of thousands of words to cover all the bases and be charitable and approach the issue from a dozen different angles. 

But that takes time. It's a serious inconvenience. And far worse is that it's a selectively applied inconvenience, for Said almost never puts in less effort in his comments than the authors themselves did in their posts when they failed to elucidate or convincingly argue for their points (as you did when you ran away^[2] here). 

Said is doing a public service by pointing out when the emperor has no clothes, when respected authors are failing to uphold the most basic of lessons the Sequences instilled in this site's culture, when obfuscatory language masks the absence of substance, and when the actual basics of rationality are being trampled on. (Which, in my view, serves as an accurate, if harsh, summary of what you were doing in the very post that spawned this whole argument.) 

To the extent this upsets authors, that's their problem, and it's them who should change. And if complying with the spirit of the Sequences is just too difficult for them, well... good riddance, as sad as it may be to say.

In any case, I doubt any of this will be persuasive to you-in-particular. But I believe it needed to be said, and this is as good a place as any to stake out my position in this long-running sort-of LW culture war.

The current conflict between you and him is just the latest entry in this long-running series, the same recurrent notes played on a different instrument. Is it that surprising it did not end any differently?

1. ^{^}

   For this has long ago become a political topic on this site, with well-established sides

2. ^{^}

   Uncharitable word choice? I think not, but all can judge the object-level for themselves by reading the linked conversation