I quite appreciated both this post and your comment. (Which I’ve stumbled upon 6 years late due to this post.)
I was going to comment something related. Specifically, when I read:
This post has a nice breakdown of the various different reasons we might give critical feedback: To help someone improve To see a change we would like To further the discussion To hurt someone To vent frustrations To boost our ego
...it occurred to me that I think an additional, common reason for giving critical feedback is to signal one’s knowledge or intelligence. (I’d say that that’s related but not identical to boosting our ego.)
If I’m being honest, I notice I’m sometimes motivated to comment on the forum for this reason. I don’t think that that’s inherently bad, and I think there is an upside: the desire to signal that I know stuff motivates me to post and comment more on the forum, which (I hope) actually does benefit others in some ways. But that motivation could also lead to making comments that aren’t actually net positive (once you factor in how the comments make other people feel), or making comments in a way that’s suboptimal (e.g., with the wrong sort of tone).
So I try to pay attention to whether that motivation is playing a major role in my decision-making. And, when it seems like it might be, I try to increase how carefully I assess whether it’s worth me making the comment, and whether I should adjust how I phrase it.
(That said, a norm promoting that sort of approach could conceivably go too far, in a way that slows people down and reduces discussion to a greater extent than is worthwhile.)
I quite appreciated both this post and your comment. (Which I’ve stumbled upon 6 years late due to this post.)
I was going to comment something related. Specifically, when I read:
...it occurred to me that I think an additional, common reason for giving critical feedback is to signal one’s knowledge or intelligence. (I’d say that that’s related but not identical to boosting our ego.)
If I’m being honest, I notice I’m sometimes motivated to comment on the forum for this reason. I don’t think that that’s inherently bad, and I think there is an upside: the desire to signal that I know stuff motivates me to post and comment more on the forum, which (I hope) actually does benefit others in some ways. But that motivation could also lead to making comments that aren’t actually net positive (once you factor in how the comments make other people feel), or making comments in a way that’s suboptimal (e.g., with the wrong sort of tone).
So I try to pay attention to whether that motivation is playing a major role in my decision-making. And, when it seems like it might be, I try to increase how carefully I assess whether it’s worth me making the comment, and whether I should adjust how I phrase it.
(That said, a norm promoting that sort of approach could conceivably go too far, in a way that slows people down and reduces discussion to a greater extent than is worthwhile.)