I did not realise you are a new user and probably would have framed my comment differently if I had, I am sorry about that!
To familiarise yourself with our writing guidelines, you can find them on the left bar under ‘About the Forum’, or just click.
In the past, other users have stated they prefer when people who downvote give explanations for their downvotes. This does seem particularly helpful if you are new and don’t know the ins and outs of our forum guidelines and norms yet.
It is great to see you engage with your expertise, and I think it would be a shame if users are put off from engaging with your writing because your content is framed antagonistically.
I read this post before I encountered this comment. I didn’t recall seeing anything unkind or uncivil. I then re-read the post to see if I missed anything.
I still haven’t been able to find anything problematic. In fact, I notice a few things that I really appreciate from Mark. Some of these include:
Acknowledging explicitly that he’s sometimes rude to his opponents (and explaining why)
Acknowledging certain successes of those he disagrees with (e.g., “I’ll give this win to Tristan and Roose.”)
Citing specific actions/quotes when criticizing others (e.g., the quote from the Joe Rogan podcast)
Acknowledging criticisms of his own work
Overall, I found the piece to be thoughtfully written & in alignment with the community guidelines. I’m also relatively new to the forum, though, so please point out if I’m misinterpreting the guidelines.
I’ll also add that I appreciate/support the guideline of “approaching disagreements with curiosity” and “aim to explain, not persuade.” But I also think that it would be a mistake to overapply these. In some contexts, it makes sense for a writer to “aim to persuade” and approach a disagreement from the standpoint of expertise rather than curiosity.
Like any post, I’m sure this post could have been written in a way that was more kind/curious/community-normsy. But I’m struggling to see any areas in which this post falls short. I also think “over-correcting” could have harms (e.g., causing people to worry excessively about how to phrase things, deterring people from posting, reducing the clarity of posts, making writers feel like they have to pretend to be super curious when they’re actually trying to persuade).
Denise, do you mind pointing out some parts of the post that violate the writing guidelines? (It’s not your responsibility, of course, and I fully understand if you don’t have time to articulate it. If you do, though, I think I’d find it helpful & it might help me understand the guidelines better.)
Sure. I am pretty baffled by the response to my comments. I agree the first was insufficiently careful about the fact that Mark is a new user, but even the second got downvotes.
In the past, users of the forum have said many times that posting on the EA Forum gives them anxiety as they are afraid of hostile criticism. So I think it is good to be on the lookout for posts and comments that might have this effect. Being ‘kind’ and ‘approaching disagreements with curiosity’ should protect against this risk.
But I ask the question: Is Tristan going to feel comfortable engaging in the Forum, in particular as a response to this post? I don’t think so.
Quotes I thought were problematic in that I think they would upset Tristan or put him off responding (or others who might work with him or agree with him):
I have a mini Nassim Taleb inside me that I let out for special occasions 😠. I’m sometimes rude to Tristan, Kevin Roose and others.
I read this as Mark proudly announcing that he likes to violate good discourse norms.
Others which I think will make feel Tristan accused and unwelcome (not ‘kind’ and not ‘approaching disagreements with curiosity’):
It is because he has been one of the most influential people in building a white hot moral panic, and frequently bends truth for the cause.
Tristan’s hyperbole sets the stage for drastic action.
Generally hostile:
To play by gentlemans rules is to their advantage—curtailing the tools in at my disposal to makes bullshit as costly as possible.
If the ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ section had not been written, I would not have downvoted, as it seems to add little to the content, while making Tristan likely feel very unwelcome.
There was a post which was similar in style to Mark’s post arguing against Will here and the response to that was pretty negative, so I am surprised that Mark’s post is being perceived so differently.
I only rarely downvote. There have been frequent requests in the past that it would be good if users generally explained why they downvoted. This has not come up before, but I took from that that the next time I downvote, it would be good if I explained why. So I did. And then got heavily downvoted myself for it.
I am not sure what to make of this—are the people requesting for downvoters to generally explain themselves just different people than the ones who downvoted my comment (apparently so, otherwise they would have explained themselves)? Whatever is the reason, I doubt I will explain my downvotes again in the future.
Thank you, Denise! I think this gives me a much better sense of some specific parts of the post that may be problematic. I still don’t think this post, on balance, is particularly “bad” discourse (my judgment might be too affected by what I see on other online discussion platforms—and maybe as I spend more time on the EA forum, I’ll raise my standards!). Nonetheless, your comment helped me see where you’re coming from.
I’ll add that I appreciated that you explained why you downvoted, and it seems like a good norm to me. I think some of the downvotes might just be people who disagree with you. However, I also think some people may be reacting to the way you articulated your explanation. I’ll explain what I mean below:
In the first comment, it seemed to me (and others) like you assumed Mark intentionally violated the norms. You also accused him of being unkind and uncurious without offering additional details.
In the second comment, you linked to the guidelines, but you didn’t engage with Mark’s claim (“I think this was kind and curious given the context.”). This seemed a bit dismissive to me (akin to when people assume that a genuine disagreement is simply due to a lack of information/education on the part of the person they disagree with).
In the third comment (which I upvoted), you explained some specific parts of the post that you found excessively unkind/uncivil. This was the first comment where I started to understand why you downvoted this post.
To me, this might explain why your most recent post has received a lot of upvotes. In terms of “what to make of this,” I hope you don’t conclude “users should not explain why they downvote.” Rather, I wonder if a conclusion like “users should explain why they downvote comments, and they should do so in ways that are kind & curious, ideally supported by specific examples when possible” would be accurate. Of course, the higher the bar to justify a downvote, the fewer people will do it, and I don’t think we should always expect downvote-explainers to write up a thorough essay on why they’re downvoting.
Finally, I’ll briefly add that upvotes/downvotes are useful metrics, but I wouldn’t place too much value in them. I’m guessing that upvotes/downvotes often correspond to “do I agree with this?” rather than “do I think this is a valuable contribution?” Even if your most recent comment had 99 downvotes, I would still find it helpful and appreciate it!
I wished that the initial comment had been more specific given the user’s status and the tone of the criticism (when I put myself in the author’s shoes, I could imagine being baffled, since the tone of “my” post was relatively tame by the standards of most online discussion spaces).
I downvoted that comment, because I didn’t see the explanation as helpful to the author and I want to discourage comments that attack an author’s motivations without evidence (“you are clearly deciding against both of these”—I wouldn’t call the post “kind”, but it seemed reasonably curious to me in that it closely engaged with Tristan’s work and acknowledged that he had achieved some of his aims, with plausibly good results).
I thought the third comment was really helpful, and is exactly what I hoped to see from the first comment. I upvoted it. Highlighting specific passages is great; it was also nice to see language like “I read X as the author intending Y” rather than “by X, the author intended Y”.
As for the post itself, I chose not to vote, as I was caught between upvoting and downvoting. I also objected to elements of the author’s tone, but I thought the content was a useful counterpoint to a widely-experienced piece of EA content and provided enough specific arguments for commentators to engage productively.
I expect that people interpreted the “You are clearly deciding against both of these” as an unkind/uncharitable phrase, since it reads like an accusation of deliberate wrongdoing. I expect that, if you’d instead said something like “Parts of your post seem unnecessarily inflammatory”, then it wouldn’t have received such a negative response.
I also personally tend to interpret the kindness guidelines as being primarily about how to engage with people who are on the forum, or who are likely to read forum posts. Of course we shouldn’t be rude in general, but it seems significantly less bad to critique external literature harshly than to directly critique people harshly.
I agree that the kindness guidelines are largely related to community management. I also think they apply more weakly to public figures than to other people who aren’t active on the Forum. When someone who has a Netflix special and influence over millions of listeners is making ostensibly bad/deceptive arguments, the stakes are higher than usual, and I’m more likely to think that criticism is valuable enough that even “unkind” responses are net-valuable.
That said, all of this is contextual; if people began to violate the norm more often, moderation would crack down more to arrest the slide. I haven’t seen this happening.
I also really appreciate your comments. I didn‘t downvote your initial comment, but my first reaction upon seeing it was something like „Hey, I felt really positive about a researcher coming to the forum and explaining why he disagrees with Tristan. I don’t want someone to discourage this from happening!“ I’ve initially read the parts you cited partly as tongue in cheek and maybe as a little unnecessary, but far from wanting to signal that the overall contribution was not welcome.
I appreciate that you explained your negative reaction a lot, especially given how rarely people do it. I did read over the parts you cited not even wondering much how Tristan would react to it and I think it’s great someone brought it up as I now think that new users of our forum should strive to communicate disagreements less confrontationally than is common on other platforms. So I think it’d be unfortunate if you feel discouraged from this experience.
Thank you all for your responses, I really appreciated them. Your perspectives make more sense to me now, though I have to say I still feel really confused.
[Following comment not exhaustively responding to everything you said.]
I hadn’t intended to communicate in my first comment that Mark deliberately intended to violate the forum guidelines, but that he deliberately decided against being kind and curious. (Thank you for pointing that out, I did not think of the alternative reading.)
I didn’t provide any evidence for this because I thought Mark said this very explicitly at the start of his post:
To play by gentlemans rules is to their advantage—curtailing the tools in at my disposal to makes bullshit as costly as possible.
I acknowledge there are some negative costs to this (e.g. polluting the information commons with avoidable conflict), and good people can disagree about if the tradeoff is worth it. But I believe it is.
Gentleman’s rules usually include things like being kind and curious I would guess, and Mark says explicitly that he ignores them because the tradeoff is worth it to him. I don’t understand how these lines can be interpreted in any other way, this seems like the literal reading to me.
I have to admit that even after all your kind elaborate explanations I struggle to understand how anything in the section ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ could be read as tongue-in-cheek, as it reads very openly hostile to me (...it’s right there in the title?) .
I don’t think it is that unlikely that interviewees on the 80k podcast would respond to a kind thoughtful critique on the EA Forum. That said, this is not just about Tristan, but everyone who might disagree with Mark, as the ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ section made me doubt they would be treated with curiosity and kindness.
I will take from this that people can have very different interpretations of the same content, even if I think the content is is very explicit and straightforward.
I wasn’t aware of the writing guidelines. But also, I think this was kind and curious given the context, so I downvoted your comment.
I did not realise you are a new user and probably would have framed my comment differently if I had, I am sorry about that!
To familiarise yourself with our writing guidelines, you can find them on the left bar under ‘About the Forum’, or just click.
In the past, other users have stated they prefer when people who downvote give explanations for their downvotes. This does seem particularly helpful if you are new and don’t know the ins and outs of our forum guidelines and norms yet.
It is great to see you engage with your expertise, and I think it would be a shame if users are put off from engaging with your writing because your content is framed antagonistically.
I read this post before I encountered this comment. I didn’t recall seeing anything unkind or uncivil. I then re-read the post to see if I missed anything.
I still haven’t been able to find anything problematic. In fact, I notice a few things that I really appreciate from Mark. Some of these include:
Acknowledging explicitly that he’s sometimes rude to his opponents (and explaining why)
Acknowledging certain successes of those he disagrees with (e.g., “I’ll give this win to Tristan and Roose.”)
Citing specific actions/quotes when criticizing others (e.g., the quote from the Joe Rogan podcast)
Acknowledging criticisms of his own work
Overall, I found the piece to be thoughtfully written & in alignment with the community guidelines. I’m also relatively new to the forum, though, so please point out if I’m misinterpreting the guidelines.
I’ll also add that I appreciate/support the guideline of “approaching disagreements with curiosity” and “aim to explain, not persuade.” But I also think that it would be a mistake to overapply these. In some contexts, it makes sense for a writer to “aim to persuade” and approach a disagreement from the standpoint of expertise rather than curiosity.
Like any post, I’m sure this post could have been written in a way that was more kind/curious/community-normsy. But I’m struggling to see any areas in which this post falls short. I also think “over-correcting” could have harms (e.g., causing people to worry excessively about how to phrase things, deterring people from posting, reducing the clarity of posts, making writers feel like they have to pretend to be super curious when they’re actually trying to persuade).
Denise, do you mind pointing out some parts of the post that violate the writing guidelines? (It’s not your responsibility, of course, and I fully understand if you don’t have time to articulate it. If you do, though, I think I’d find it helpful & it might help me understand the guidelines better.)
Sure. I am pretty baffled by the response to my comments. I agree the first was insufficiently careful about the fact that Mark is a new user, but even the second got downvotes.
In the past, users of the forum have said many times that posting on the EA Forum gives them anxiety as they are afraid of hostile criticism. So I think it is good to be on the lookout for posts and comments that might have this effect. Being ‘kind’ and ‘approaching disagreements with curiosity’ should protect against this risk. But I ask the question: Is Tristan going to feel comfortable engaging in the Forum, in particular as a response to this post? I don’t think so.
Quotes I thought were problematic in that I think they would upset Tristan or put him off responding (or others who might work with him or agree with him):
I read this as Mark proudly announcing that he likes to violate good discourse norms.
Others which I think will make feel Tristan accused and unwelcome (not ‘kind’ and not ‘approaching disagreements with curiosity’):
Generally hostile:
If the ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ section had not been written, I would not have downvoted, as it seems to add little to the content, while making Tristan likely feel very unwelcome.
There was a post which was similar in style to Mark’s post arguing against Will here and the response to that was pretty negative, so I am surprised that Mark’s post is being perceived so differently.
I only rarely downvote. There have been frequent requests in the past that it would be good if users generally explained why they downvoted. This has not come up before, but I took from that that the next time I downvote, it would be good if I explained why. So I did. And then got heavily downvoted myself for it. I am not sure what to make of this—are the people requesting for downvoters to generally explain themselves just different people than the ones who downvoted my comment (apparently so, otherwise they would have explained themselves)? Whatever is the reason, I doubt I will explain my downvotes again in the future.
Thank you, Denise! I think this gives me a much better sense of some specific parts of the post that may be problematic. I still don’t think this post, on balance, is particularly “bad” discourse (my judgment might be too affected by what I see on other online discussion platforms—and maybe as I spend more time on the EA forum, I’ll raise my standards!). Nonetheless, your comment helped me see where you’re coming from.
I’ll add that I appreciated that you explained why you downvoted, and it seems like a good norm to me. I think some of the downvotes might just be people who disagree with you. However, I also think some people may be reacting to the way you articulated your explanation. I’ll explain what I mean below:
In the first comment, it seemed to me (and others) like you assumed Mark intentionally violated the norms. You also accused him of being unkind and uncurious without offering additional details.
In the second comment, you linked to the guidelines, but you didn’t engage with Mark’s claim (“I think this was kind and curious given the context.”). This seemed a bit dismissive to me (akin to when people assume that a genuine disagreement is simply due to a lack of information/education on the part of the person they disagree with).
In the third comment (which I upvoted), you explained some specific parts of the post that you found excessively unkind/uncivil. This was the first comment where I started to understand why you downvoted this post.
To me, this might explain why your most recent post has received a lot of upvotes. In terms of “what to make of this,” I hope you don’t conclude “users should not explain why they downvote.” Rather, I wonder if a conclusion like “users should explain why they downvote comments, and they should do so in ways that are kind & curious, ideally supported by specific examples when possible” would be accurate. Of course, the higher the bar to justify a downvote, the fewer people will do it, and I don’t think we should always expect downvote-explainers to write up a thorough essay on why they’re downvoting.
Finally, I’ll briefly add that upvotes/downvotes are useful metrics, but I wouldn’t place too much value in them. I’m guessing that upvotes/downvotes often correspond to “do I agree with this?” rather than “do I think this is a valuable contribution?” Even if your most recent comment had 99 downvotes, I would still find it helpful and appreciate it!
My reaction was similar to Akash’s.
I wished that the initial comment had been more specific given the user’s status and the tone of the criticism (when I put myself in the author’s shoes, I could imagine being baffled, since the tone of “my” post was relatively tame by the standards of most online discussion spaces).
I downvoted that comment, because I didn’t see the explanation as helpful to the author and I want to discourage comments that attack an author’s motivations without evidence (“you are clearly deciding against both of these”—I wouldn’t call the post “kind”, but it seemed reasonably curious to me in that it closely engaged with Tristan’s work and acknowledged that he had achieved some of his aims, with plausibly good results).
I thought the third comment was really helpful, and is exactly what I hoped to see from the first comment. I upvoted it. Highlighting specific passages is great; it was also nice to see language like “I read X as the author intending Y” rather than “by X, the author intended Y”.
As for the post itself, I chose not to vote, as I was caught between upvoting and downvoting. I also objected to elements of the author’s tone, but I thought the content was a useful counterpoint to a widely-experienced piece of EA content and provided enough specific arguments for commentators to engage productively.
I expect that people interpreted the “You are clearly deciding against both of these” as an unkind/uncharitable phrase, since it reads like an accusation of deliberate wrongdoing. I expect that, if you’d instead said something like “Parts of your post seem unnecessarily inflammatory”, then it wouldn’t have received such a negative response.
I also personally tend to interpret the kindness guidelines as being primarily about how to engage with people who are on the forum, or who are likely to read forum posts. Of course we shouldn’t be rude in general, but it seems significantly less bad to critique external literature harshly than to directly critique people harshly.
I agree that the kindness guidelines are largely related to community management. I also think they apply more weakly to public figures than to other people who aren’t active on the Forum. When someone who has a Netflix special and influence over millions of listeners is making ostensibly bad/deceptive arguments, the stakes are higher than usual, and I’m more likely to think that criticism is valuable enough that even “unkind” responses are net-valuable.
That said, all of this is contextual; if people began to violate the norm more often, moderation would crack down more to arrest the slide. I haven’t seen this happening.
I also really appreciate your comments. I didn‘t downvote your initial comment, but my first reaction upon seeing it was something like „Hey, I felt really positive about a researcher coming to the forum and explaining why he disagrees with Tristan. I don’t want someone to discourage this from happening!“ I’ve initially read the parts you cited partly as tongue in cheek and maybe as a little unnecessary, but far from wanting to signal that the overall contribution was not welcome.
I appreciate that you explained your negative reaction a lot, especially given how rarely people do it. I did read over the parts you cited not even wondering much how Tristan would react to it and I think it’s great someone brought it up as I now think that new users of our forum should strive to communicate disagreements less confrontationally than is common on other platforms. So I think it’d be unfortunate if you feel discouraged from this experience.
Thank you all for your responses, I really appreciated them. Your perspectives make more sense to me now, though I have to say I still feel really confused.
[Following comment not exhaustively responding to everything you said.]
I hadn’t intended to communicate in my first comment that Mark deliberately intended to violate the forum guidelines, but that he deliberately decided against being kind and curious. (Thank you for pointing that out, I did not think of the alternative reading.) I didn’t provide any evidence for this because I thought Mark said this very explicitly at the start of his post:
Gentleman’s rules usually include things like being kind and curious I would guess, and Mark says explicitly that he ignores them because the tradeoff is worth it to him. I don’t understand how these lines can be interpreted in any other way, this seems like the literal reading to me.
I have to admit that even after all your kind elaborate explanations I struggle to understand how anything in the section ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ could be read as tongue-in-cheek, as it reads very openly hostile to me (...it’s right there in the title?) .
I don’t think it is that unlikely that interviewees on the 80k podcast would respond to a kind thoughtful critique on the EA Forum. That said, this is not just about Tristan, but everyone who might disagree with Mark, as the ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ section made me doubt they would be treated with curiosity and kindness.
I will take from this that people can have very different interpretations of the same content, even if I think the content is is very explicit and straightforward.