It seems like august!aella was really on the ball here; commenters just shouldn’t make people feel bad so they just can’t bring themselves to post there again. That’s pretty simple and to-the-point.
Where was this originally posted?
But many of the actual claims being responded to in this fashion are not powerful snippets of propaganda, or nascent hypnotic suggestions, or psychological Trojan horses. They aren’t the workings of an antagonist. They’re just half-baked ideas, and you can either respond to a half-baked idea by helping to bake it properly...
...or you can shriek “food poisoning!” and throw it in the trash and shout out to everyone else that they need to watch out, someone’s trying to poison everybody.
The problem is that there are antagonists out there, especially on twitter, and those antagonists do make full-baked snippets of propaganda, clever suggestions, and psychological trojan horses. You’ll find examples everywhere you look. Twitter might feel friendly and safe, but it’s actually just really good at posing like that (Goodharting); the idea that twitter is actually as friendly and safe as it feels (especially compared to EAforum and Lesswrong) is liable to cause a lot of harm, and thus is worth pointing out as harmful and wrong.
There is basically no chance of improving twitter, whereas the entire premise of this post is that EAforum and Lesswrong ought to improve, because they clearly can (and have a record of doing so).
I was surprised to see Twitter noted as a good place to share thoughts, I think mainly because it’s rare I hear anyone say a good word about Twitter. I don’t use it, as my impressions of twitter are:
seems like a lot of toxic arguments, ad hominen attacks, straw man arguments etc etc unless you heavily filter to only be communicating with people who already agree with pretty much everything you say
the word limit is too short to be able to explain anything with nuance, which promotes more straw man arguments because commenters take the worst possible interpretation of what’s been said and then argue against that, which then causes the OP to be upset that they’ve been misinterpreted, so they react badly and so on and so on.
Then again, I know some people I generally respect use it. Am I missing anything here?
It seems like august!aella was really on the ball here; commenters just shouldn’t make people feel bad so they just can’t bring themselves to post there again. That’s pretty simple and to-the-point.
Where was this originally posted?
The problem is that there are antagonists out there, especially on twitter, and those antagonists do make full-baked snippets of propaganda, clever suggestions, and psychological trojan horses. You’ll find examples everywhere you look. Twitter might feel friendly and safe, but it’s actually just really good at posing like that (Goodharting); the idea that twitter is actually as friendly and safe as it feels (especially compared to EAforum and Lesswrong) is liable to cause a lot of harm, and thus is worth pointing out as harmful and wrong.
There is basically no chance of improving twitter, whereas the entire premise of this post is that EAforum and Lesswrong ought to improve, because they clearly can (and have a record of doing so).
I was surprised to see Twitter noted as a good place to share thoughts, I think mainly because it’s rare I hear anyone say a good word about Twitter. I don’t use it, as my impressions of twitter are:
seems like a lot of toxic arguments, ad hominen attacks, straw man arguments etc etc unless you heavily filter to only be communicating with people who already agree with pretty much everything you say
the word limit is too short to be able to explain anything with nuance, which promotes more straw man arguments because commenters take the worst possible interpretation of what’s been said and then argue against that, which then causes the OP to be upset that they’ve been misinterpreted, so they react badly and so on and so on.
Then again, I know some people I generally respect use it. Am I missing anything here?
EA twitter is great.