I feel like I’ve heard this position a lot before, and I have some sympathy for it, but I feel like it implicitly overlooks a lot of what I find valuable about writing EA Forum comments, and it sets an overly high bar.
When one writes academic papers, one is expected to cite relevant previous work. Credit assignation is an important mechanism for tracing the evidence for claims and for assigning credit. Even in academic spheres, I think this is perhaps taken pathologically far (to the point where it probably sometimes is unduly burdensome and vaguely implies that pretty obvious ideas or hypotheses had to have come from someone else as opposed to being generated by the author), but the reasons why it’s important to cite your claims seem a lot stronger in academia.
The EA Forum is partly intended, I believe, to be a place where people are encouraged to say things more quickly and speculatively after having done less research, and where people are more encouraged to share their own overall judgments and thinking process without necessarily fully defending all their positions. You might think it’s bad to have such a place and that people should mostly just rely on the academic literature. I disagree with that, but trying to make the EA Forum use the same standards that academia uses seems counterproductive. We can just use academia for that.
And at least in my mind, a big part of the point of writing things like what Linch wrote is about trying to practice my critical thinking skills and appling them to new areas, for the eventual purpose of use in areas where there’s not already a lot of scholarship. So I value approaching an area I don’t know much about, like the topic of war crimes, and trying to understand it on my own and seeing how far I can get and forming my own view rather than necessarily seeing this as strictly an opportunity to practice building on existing literature on war crimes (or worse, just regurgitating that literature undiscerningly)
I feel like I’ve heard this position a lot before, and I have some sympathy for it, but I feel like it implicitly overlooks a lot of what I find valuable about writing EA Forum comments, and it sets an overly high bar.
When one writes academic papers, one is expected to cite relevant previous work. Credit assignation is an important mechanism for tracing the evidence for claims and for assigning credit. Even in academic spheres, I think this is perhaps taken pathologically far (to the point where it probably sometimes is unduly burdensome and vaguely implies that pretty obvious ideas or hypotheses had to have come from someone else as opposed to being generated by the author), but the reasons why it’s important to cite your claims seem a lot stronger in academia.
The EA Forum is partly intended, I believe, to be a place where people are encouraged to say things more quickly and speculatively after having done less research, and where people are more encouraged to share their own overall judgments and thinking process without necessarily fully defending all their positions. You might think it’s bad to have such a place and that people should mostly just rely on the academic literature. I disagree with that, but trying to make the EA Forum use the same standards that academia uses seems counterproductive. We can just use academia for that.
And at least in my mind, a big part of the point of writing things like what Linch wrote is about trying to practice my critical thinking skills and appling them to new areas, for the eventual purpose of use in areas where there’s not already a lot of scholarship. So I value approaching an area I don’t know much about, like the topic of war crimes, and trying to understand it on my own and seeing how far I can get and forming my own view rather than necessarily seeing this as strictly an opportunity to practice building on existing literature on war crimes (or worse, just regurgitating that literature undiscerningly)