The concreteness is helpful because I think my take is that, in general, writing something like this is emotionally exhausting (not to mention time consuming!) - especially so if you’ve got skin in the game and across your life you often come up across things like this to respond to and you keep having the pressure to force your feelings into a more acceptable format.
Yep, I think it absolutely is.
It’s also not an accident that my version of the comment is a lot longer and covers more topics (and therefore would presumably have taken way longer for someone to write and edit in a way they personally endorsed).
I don’t think the minimally acceptable comment needed to be quite that long or cover quite that much ground (though I think it would be praiseworthy to do so), but directionally I’m indeed asking people to do a significantly harder thing. And I expect this to be especially hard in exactly the situations where it matters most.
I reckon that crafting a message like that if I were upset about something could well take half a work day. And I’d have in my head all the being upset / being angry / being scared people on the forum would find me unreasonable / resentful that people might find me unreasonable / doubting myself the whole time. (Though I know plausibly that I’m in part just the describing the human condition there. Trying to do things is hard...!)
❤
Yeah, that sounds all too realistic!
I’m also imagining that while the author is trying to put together their comment, they might be tracking the fact that others have already rushed out their own replies (many of which probably suck from your perspective), and discussion is continuing, and the clock is ticking before the EA Forum buries this discussion entirely.
(I wonder if there’s a way to tweak how the EA Forum works so that there’s less incentive to go super fast?)
One reason I think it’s worth trying to put in this extra effort is that it produces a virtuous cycle. If I take a bit longer to draft a comment I can more fully stand by, then other people will feel less pressure to rush out their own thoughts prematurely. Slowing down the discussion a little, and adding a bit more light relative to heat, can have a positive effect on all the other discussion that happens.
I’ve mentioned NVC a few times, but I do think NVC is a good example of a thing that can help a lot at relatively little time+effort cost. Quick easy hacks are very good here, exactly because this can otherwise be such a time suck.
A related hack is to put your immediate emotional reaction inside a ‘this is my immediate emotional reaction’ frame, and then say a few words outside that frame. Like:
“Here’s my immediate emotional reaction to the OP:
[indented italicized text]
And here are my first-pass thoughts about physical reality, which are more neutral but might also need to be revised after I learn more or have more time to chew on things:
[indented italicized text]”
This is kinda similar to some stuff I put in my imaginary Shakeel comment above, but being heavy-handed about it might be a lot easier and faster than trying to make it feel like an organic whole.
And I think it has very similar effects to the stuff I was going for, where you get to express the feeling at all, but it’s in a container that makes it (a) a bit less likely that you’ll trigger others and thereby get into a heated Internet fight, and (b) a bit less likely that your initial emotional reaction will get mistaken (by you or others) for an endorsed carefully-wordsmithed description of your factual beliefs.
Overall, I think I’m just more worried than you that requiring comments to be too far in this direction has too much of a chilling effect on discourse and is too costly for the individuals involved. And it really just is a matter of degree here and what tradeoffs we’re willing to make.
Yeah, this very much sounds to me like a topic where reasonable people can disagree a lot!
(It makes me think it’d be an interesting excerise to write a number of hypothetical comments arrange them on a scale of how much they major on carefully explaining priors, caveating, communicating meta-level intention etc. and then see where we’d draw the line of acceptable / not!)
Ooooo, this sounds very fun. :) Especially if we can tangent off into science and philosophy debates when it turns out that there’s a specific underlying disagreement that explains why we feel differently about a particular case. 😛
Yep, I think it absolutely is.
It’s also not an accident that my version of the comment is a lot longer and covers more topics (and therefore would presumably have taken way longer for someone to write and edit in a way they personally endorsed).
I don’t think the minimally acceptable comment needed to be quite that long or cover quite that much ground (though I think it would be praiseworthy to do so), but directionally I’m indeed asking people to do a significantly harder thing. And I expect this to be especially hard in exactly the situations where it matters most.
❤
Yeah, that sounds all too realistic!
I’m also imagining that while the author is trying to put together their comment, they might be tracking the fact that others have already rushed out their own replies (many of which probably suck from your perspective), and discussion is continuing, and the clock is ticking before the EA Forum buries this discussion entirely.
(I wonder if there’s a way to tweak how the EA Forum works so that there’s less incentive to go super fast?)
One reason I think it’s worth trying to put in this extra effort is that it produces a virtuous cycle. If I take a bit longer to draft a comment I can more fully stand by, then other people will feel less pressure to rush out their own thoughts prematurely. Slowing down the discussion a little, and adding a bit more light relative to heat, can have a positive effect on all the other discussion that happens.
I’ve mentioned NVC a few times, but I do think NVC is a good example of a thing that can help a lot at relatively little time+effort cost. Quick easy hacks are very good here, exactly because this can otherwise be such a time suck.
A related hack is to put your immediate emotional reaction inside a ‘this is my immediate emotional reaction’ frame, and then say a few words outside that frame. Like:
“Here’s my immediate emotional reaction to the OP:
[indented italicized text]
And here are my first-pass thoughts about physical reality, which are more neutral but might also need to be revised after I learn more or have more time to chew on things:
[indented italicized text]”
This is kinda similar to some stuff I put in my imaginary Shakeel comment above, but being heavy-handed about it might be a lot easier and faster than trying to make it feel like an organic whole.
And I think it has very similar effects to the stuff I was going for, where you get to express the feeling at all, but it’s in a container that makes it (a) a bit less likely that you’ll trigger others and thereby get into a heated Internet fight, and (b) a bit less likely that your initial emotional reaction will get mistaken (by you or others) for an endorsed carefully-wordsmithed description of your factual beliefs.
Yeah, this very much sounds to me like a topic where reasonable people can disagree a lot!
Ooooo, this sounds very fun. :) Especially if we can tangent off into science and philosophy debates when it turns out that there’s a specific underlying disagreement that explains why we feel differently about a particular case. 😛