Meta-note as a casual lurker in this thread: This comment being down-voted to oblivion while Jason’s comment is not, is pretty bizarre to me. The only explanation I can think of is that people who have provided criticism think Michael is saying they shouldn’t criticise? It is blatantly obvious to me that this is not what he is saying and is simply agreeing with Jason that specific actionable-criticism is better.
Fun meta-meta note I just realized after writing the above: This does mean I am potentially criticising some critics who are critical of how Micheal is criticising their criticism.
Okkkk, that’s enough internet for me. Peace and love, y’all.
Michael’s comment has 14 non-author up/downvotes and 10 non-author agree/disagreevotes; mine has one of each. This is possibly due to the potential to ascribe a comment by HLI’s director several meanings that are not plausible to give a comment by a disinterested observer—e.g., “Org expresses openness to changes to address concerns,” “Org is critical of critics,” etc.
I’m not endorsing any potential meaning, although I have an upvote on his comment.
The more disappointing meta-note to me is that helpful, concrete suggestions have been relatively sparse on this post as a whole. I wrote some suggestions for future epistemic practices, and someone else called for withdrawing the SM recommendation and report. But overall, there seemed to be much more energy invested in litigating than in figuring out a path forward.
...helpful, concrete suggestions have been relatively sparse on this post as a whole.
I don’t really share this sense (I think that even most of Gregory Lewis’ posts in this thread have had concretely useful advice for HLI, e.g. this one), but let’s suppose for the moment that it’s true. Should we care?
In the last round of posts, four to six months ago, HLI got plenty of concrete and helpful suggestions. A lot of them were unpleasant, stuff like “you should withdraw your cost-effectiveness analysis” and “here are ~10 easy-to-catch problems with the stats you published”, but highly specific and actionable. What came of that? What improvements has HLI made? As far as I can tell, almost nothing has changed, and they’re still fundraising off of the same flawed analyses. There wasn’t even any movement on this unambiguous blunder until you called it out. It seems to me that giving helpful, concrete suggestions to HLI has been tried, and shown to be low impact.
One thing people can do in a thread like this one is talk to HLI, to praise them, ask them questions, or try to get them to do things differently. But another thing they can do is talk to each other, to try and figure out whether they should donate to HLI or not. For that, criticism of HLI is valuable, even if it’s not directed to HLI. This, too, counts as “figuring out a path forward”.
Meta-note as a casual lurker in this thread: This comment being down-voted to oblivion while Jason’s comment is not, is pretty bizarre to me. The only explanation I can think of is that people who have provided criticism think Michael is saying they shouldn’t criticise? It is blatantly obvious to me that this is not what he is saying and is simply agreeing with Jason that specific actionable-criticism is better.
Fun meta-meta note I just realized after writing the above: This does mean I am potentially criticising some critics who are critical of how Micheal is criticising their criticism.
Okkkk, that’s enough internet for me. Peace and love, y’all.
Michael’s comment has 14 non-author up/downvotes and 10 non-author agree/disagreevotes; mine has one of each. This is possibly due to the potential to ascribe a comment by HLI’s director several meanings that are not plausible to give a comment by a disinterested observer—e.g., “Org expresses openness to changes to address concerns,” “Org is critical of critics,” etc.
I’m not endorsing any potential meaning, although I have an upvote on his comment.
The more disappointing meta-note to me is that helpful, concrete suggestions have been relatively sparse on this post as a whole. I wrote some suggestions for future epistemic practices, and someone else called for withdrawing the SM recommendation and report. But overall, there seemed to be much more energy invested in litigating than in figuring out a path forward.
I don’t really share this sense (I think that even most of Gregory Lewis’ posts in this thread have had concretely useful advice for HLI, e.g. this one), but let’s suppose for the moment that it’s true. Should we care?
In the last round of posts, four to six months ago, HLI got plenty of concrete and helpful suggestions. A lot of them were unpleasant, stuff like “you should withdraw your cost-effectiveness analysis” and “here are ~10 easy-to-catch problems with the stats you published”, but highly specific and actionable. What came of that? What improvements has HLI made? As far as I can tell, almost nothing has changed, and they’re still fundraising off of the same flawed analyses. There wasn’t even any movement on this unambiguous blunder until you called it out. It seems to me that giving helpful, concrete suggestions to HLI has been tried, and shown to be low impact.
One thing people can do in a thread like this one is talk to HLI, to praise them, ask them questions, or try to get them to do things differently. But another thing they can do is talk to each other, to try and figure out whether they should donate to HLI or not. For that, criticism of HLI is valuable, even if it’s not directed to HLI. This, too, counts as “figuring out a path forward”.