It’s really nice when people engage with comments, especially with useful comments, but I worry by making it into a norm we’re losing more than we gain as a community. Will MacAskill for example has mentioned a couple of times that he finds posting on the Forum really uncomfortable because of the comments, and in his last post explicitly said that he wouldn’t respond to any comments. In other situations, people might have to decide between writing a second post about a different topic and responding to the comments on their first post.
I agree with you that responding to comments can be really valuable—even just responding to the one or two best comments! - but I can see a lot of situations where it doesn’t end up being the best use of someone’s time or mental health.
I totally agree that there are some times when it’s correct for people not to respond. But overall I think it’s pretty clearly good to have some norm for the reasons above. Because I think that a lot of good things come out of getting to the bottom of stuff, I’d typically prefer that people posted half as many things if it meant they’d engage properly with comments on those things. I really worry that with no norm here we might lose something important about EA culture.
I think the ideal equilibrium should incur both some pain from less-response-than-we-might-hope and some pain from people-feeling-obliged-to-respond. I think maybe we’re actually doing about right at that at the moment, on average? But I think it would better if everyone felt a bit of obligation to respond and nobody felt an overwhelming obligation to respond (and I guess right now it’s more like some people feel it as overwhelming and some don’t feel it at all).
It’s really nice when people engage with comments, especially with useful comments, but I worry by making it into a norm we’re losing more than we gain as a community. Will MacAskill for example has mentioned a couple of times that he finds posting on the Forum really uncomfortable because of the comments, and in his last post explicitly said that he wouldn’t respond to any comments. In other situations, people might have to decide between writing a second post about a different topic and responding to the comments on their first post.
I agree with you that responding to comments can be really valuable—even just responding to the one or two best comments! - but I can see a lot of situations where it doesn’t end up being the best use of someone’s time or mental health.
I totally agree that there are some times when it’s correct for people not to respond. But overall I think it’s pretty clearly good to have some norm for the reasons above. Because I think that a lot of good things come out of getting to the bottom of stuff, I’d typically prefer that people posted half as many things if it meant they’d engage properly with comments on those things. I really worry that with no norm here we might lose something important about EA culture.
I think the ideal equilibrium should incur both some pain from less-response-than-we-might-hope and some pain from people-feeling-obliged-to-respond. I think maybe we’re actually doing about right at that at the moment, on average? But I think it would better if everyone felt a bit of obligation to respond and nobody felt an overwhelming obligation to respond (and I guess right now it’s more like some people feel it as overwhelming and some don’t feel it at all).
I think it’s plausible that the norm is overall a bit too strong or a bit too weak at the moment. I feel pretty bad about “no norm” though.