Thinking about this more: I think there’s some frame behind this, like,
”There are good guys and bad guys. We need to continue to make it clear that the good guys are good, and should be reluctant to draw attention to their downsides.”
In contrast, I try to think about it more like,
”There’s a bunch of humans, doing human things with human motivations. Some wind up producing more value than others. There’s expected value to be had by understanding that value, and understanding the positives/negatives of the most important human institutions. Often more attention should be spent in trying to find mistakes being made, than in highlighting things going well.”
“There are good guys and bad guys. We need to continue to make it clear that the good guys are good, and should be reluctant to draw attention to their downsides.”
I agree this will be a (very) bad epistemic move. One thing I want to avoid is disincentivizing broadly good moves because their costs are more obvious/sharp to us. There are of course genuinely good reasons to criticize mostly good but flawed decisions (people like that are more amenable to criticism so criticism of them is more useful, their decisions are more consequential). And of course there are alternative framings where critical feedback is more clearly a gift, which I would want us to move more towards.
That said, all of this is hard to navigate well in practice.
Agreed! Ideally, “getting a lot of attention and criticism, but people generally are favorable”, should be looked at far more favorably than “just not getting attention”. I think VCs get this, but many people online don’t.
Thinking about this more:
I think there’s some frame behind this, like,
”There are good guys and bad guys. We need to continue to make it clear that the good guys are good, and should be reluctant to draw attention to their downsides.”
In contrast, I try to think about it more like,
”There’s a bunch of humans, doing human things with human motivations. Some wind up producing more value than others. There’s expected value to be had by understanding that value, and understanding the positives/negatives of the most important human institutions. Often more attention should be spent in trying to find mistakes being made, than in highlighting things going well.”
Thanks for elucidating your thoughts more here.
I agree this will be a (very) bad epistemic move. One thing I want to avoid is disincentivizing broadly good moves because their costs are more obvious/sharp to us. There are of course genuinely good reasons to criticize mostly good but flawed decisions (people like that are more amenable to criticism so criticism of them is more useful, their decisions are more consequential). And of course there are alternative framings where critical feedback is more clearly a gift, which I would want us to move more towards.
That said, all of this is hard to navigate well in practice.
Agreed! Ideally, “getting a lot of attention and criticism, but people generally are favorable”, should be looked at far more favorably than “just not getting attention”. I think VCs get this, but many people online don’t.