I empathize with your experience on the EA Forum. The top comment on this post is a clear example where someone just fundamentally misunderstood the point you were trying to make, and responded in an unhelpful and kinda snarky way. Then when you clarified your point to them, they just repeated their original point again. Really frustrating. Sometimes it seems like people don’t have the patience to deeply engage, yet they do have the patience to comment (often rudely). Which is not a good headspace for discussion.
It could potentially be nice to have alternatives to the EA Forum where stronger discussion norms around civility and generosity are upheld. I don’t know if there is a critical mass of people to support that, though. I can potentially send a group chat invite to anyone who wants to message me privately here or on Substack, or email me.
The biggest thing for the mods to understand is when you let people act abusively, it pisses people off so much, and it’s so hurtful and feels so yucky, people don’t want to engage anymore. There are people on the EA Forum who effectively have a heckler’s veto because they just make the experience of using the forum too unpleasant to tolerate for anyone they disagree with. And the end result is you get an insular culture, where even pointing out objective, uncontroversial flaws in research or analysis gets strongly discouraged.
I had a horrible time pointing out errors in a survey. I got a brusque, dismissive response. And a lot of downvotes. The errors were later corrected, but I didn’t get any apology or even acknowledgement. What a thankless job!
You have to be able to tolerate the discomfort of disagreement and intellectual criticism, to have the patience to deeply engage, to have curiosity about other people’s perspectives and humility about your own, in order to think well and do good analysis. Using personal insults and hostility to shut down disagreement and criticism is not intellectually healthy.
I empathize with your experience on the EA Forum. The top comment on this post is a clear example where someone just fundamentally misunderstood the point you were trying to make, and responded in an unhelpful and kinda snarky way. Then when you clarified your point to them, they just repeated their original point again. Really frustrating. Sometimes it seems like people don’t have the patience to deeply engage, yet they do have the patience to comment (often rudely). Which is not a good headspace for discussion.
It could potentially be nice to have alternatives to the EA Forum where stronger discussion norms around civility and generosity are upheld. I don’t know if there is a critical mass of people to support that, though. I can potentially send a group chat invite to anyone who wants to message me privately here or on Substack, or email me.
The biggest thing for the mods to understand is when you let people act abusively, it pisses people off so much, and it’s so hurtful and feels so yucky, people don’t want to engage anymore. There are people on the EA Forum who effectively have a heckler’s veto because they just make the experience of using the forum too unpleasant to tolerate for anyone they disagree with. And the end result is you get an insular culture, where even pointing out objective, uncontroversial flaws in research or analysis gets strongly discouraged.
I had a horrible time pointing out errors in a survey. I got a brusque, dismissive response. And a lot of downvotes. The errors were later corrected, but I didn’t get any apology or even acknowledgement. What a thankless job!
You have to be able to tolerate the discomfort of disagreement and intellectual criticism, to have the patience to deeply engage, to have curiosity about other people’s perspectives and humility about your own, in order to think well and do good analysis. Using personal insults and hostility to shut down disagreement and criticism is not intellectually healthy.