...it still helps move the conversation forward by clarifying where the debate is at.
Anything Nate writes would do that, because he’s one of the debaters, right? He could have written “It’s a stupid post and I’m not going to read it”, literally just that one sentence, and it would still tell us something surprising about the debate. In some ways that post would be better than the one we got: it’s shorter, and much clearer about how much work he put in. But I would still downvote it, and I imagine you would too. Even allowing for the value of the debate itself, the bar is higher than that.
For me, that bar is at least as high as “read the whole article before replying to it”. If you don’t have time to read an article that’s totally fine, but then you don’t have time to post about it either.
Anything Nate writes would do that, because he’s one of the debaters, right? He could have written “It’s a stupid post and I’m not going to read it”, literally just that one sentence, and it would still tell us something surprising about the debate. In some ways that post would be better than the one we got: it’s shorter, and much clearer about how much work he put in. But I would still downvote it, and I imagine you would too. Even allowing for the value of the debate itself, the bar is higher than that.
For me, that bar is at least as high as “read the whole article before replying to it”. If you don’t have time to read an article that’s totally fine, but then you don’t have time to post about it either.