Maybe, but I find it important to maintain the sort of culture where one can be confidently wrong about something without fear that it’ll cause people to interpret all future arguments only in light of that mistake instead of taking them at face value and evaluating them for their own merit.
The sort of entrepreneurialness that I still feel is somewhat lacking in EA requires committing a lot of time to a speculative idea on the off-chance that it is correct. If it is not, the entrepreneur has wasted a lot of time and usually money. If additionally it has the social cost that they can’t try again because people will dismiss them because of that past failure, it makes it just so much less likely still that anyone will try in the first place.
Of course that’s not the status quo. I just really don’t want EA to move in that direction.
“A bit confused” wasn’t meant to be any sort of rhetorical pretend understatement or something. I really just felt a slight surprise that caused me to check whether the forum rules contain something about ad hom, and found that they don’t. It may well be the right call on balance. I trust the forum team on that.
Maybe, but I find it important to maintain the sort of culture where one can be confidently wrong about something without fear that it’ll cause people to interpret all future arguments only in light of that mistake instead of taking them at face value and evaluating them for their own merit.
The sort of entrepreneurialness that I still feel is somewhat lacking in EA requires committing a lot of time to a speculative idea on the off-chance that it is correct. If it is not, the entrepreneur has wasted a lot of time and usually money. If additionally it has the social cost that they can’t try again because people will dismiss them because of that past failure, it makes it just so much less likely still that anyone will try in the first place.
Of course that’s not the status quo. I just really don’t want EA to move in that direction.
If anything, I think that prohibiting posts like this from being published would have a more detrimental effect on community culture.
Of course, people are welcome to criticise Ben’s post—which some in fact do. That’s a very different category from prohibition.
Yeah, that sounds perfectly plausible to me.
“A bit confused” wasn’t meant to be any sort of rhetorical pretend understatement or something. I really just felt a slight surprise that caused me to check whether the forum rules contain something about ad hom, and found that they don’t. It may well be the right call on balance. I trust the forum team on that.