I feel like you are missing some important causal avenues through which plentiful criticism can be good:
If the expectation of harsh future criticism is a major deterrent from engagement, presumably it disproportionately deters the type of projects that expect to be especially criticized.
Criticism is educational for third parties reading and can help improve their future projects.
Disproportionately deterring bad projects is a crux. I think if people are running a “minimise criticism policy” they aren’t going to end up doing very useful things (or they’ll do everything in secret or far from EA). I currently don’t think nearly enough people are trying to start projects and many project explorations seem good to me on net, so the discrimination power needs to be pretty strong for the benefits to pencil.
I think there are positives about criticism which I didn’t focus on, but yeah if I were to write a more comprehensive post I think the points you raised are good to include.
I’m not convinced that criticism is very counterfactually educational for 3rd parties. Particularly when imo lots of criticism is bad. Feels like it could go either way. If more criticism came from people who had run substantial projects or operated in the same field or whatever I think I’d trust their takes more. Many of the examples raised in this thread are good imo and have this property.
I feel like you are missing some important causal avenues through which plentiful criticism can be good:
If the expectation of harsh future criticism is a major deterrent from engagement, presumably it disproportionately deters the type of projects that expect to be especially criticized.
Criticism is educational for third parties reading and can help improve their future projects.
Disproportionately deterring bad projects is a crux. I think if people are running a “minimise criticism policy” they aren’t going to end up doing very useful things (or they’ll do everything in secret or far from EA). I currently don’t think nearly enough people are trying to start projects and many project explorations seem good to me on net, so the discrimination power needs to be pretty strong for the benefits to pencil.
I think there are positives about criticism which I didn’t focus on, but yeah if I were to write a more comprehensive post I think the points you raised are good to include.
I’m not convinced that criticism is very counterfactually educational for 3rd parties. Particularly when imo lots of criticism is bad. Feels like it could go either way. If more criticism came from people who had run substantial projects or operated in the same field or whatever I think I’d trust their takes more. Many of the examples raised in this thread are good imo and have this property.