“I don’t see you doing much acknowledging what might be good about the stuff that you critique”
I don’t think it’s important for criticisms to do this.
I think it’s fair to expect readers to view things on a spectrum, and interpret critiques as an argument in favour of moving in a certain direction along a spectrum, rather than going to the other extreme.
I agree but having written long criticisms of EA, doing this consistently can make the writing annoyingly long-winded.
I think it’s better for EAs to be steelmanning criticisms as they read, especially via “would I agree with a weaker version of this claim” and via the reversal test, than for writers to explore trade-offs for every proposed imperfection in EA.
Agreed. When people require literally everything to be written in the same place by the same author/small-group, it disincentives writing potentially important posts.
“I don’t see you doing much acknowledging what might be good about the stuff that you critique”
I don’t think it’s important for criticisms to do this.
I think it’s fair to expect readers to view things on a spectrum, and interpret critiques as an argument in favour of moving in a certain direction along a spectrum, rather than going to the other extreme.
Criticisms don’t have to do this, but it would be more persuasive if it did.
I agree but having written long criticisms of EA, doing this consistently can make the writing annoyingly long-winded.
I think it’s better for EAs to be steelmanning criticisms as they read, especially via “would I agree with a weaker version of this claim” and via the reversal test, than for writers to explore trade-offs for every proposed imperfection in EA.
Agreed. When people require literally everything to be written in the same place by the same author/small-group, it disincentives writing potentially important posts.