Sorry if this is a bit of a tangent but it seems possible to me to frame a lot of the ideas from the paper as wholly uncontroversial contributions to priorities research. In fact I remember a number of the ideas being raised in the spirit of contributions by various researchers over the years, for which they expected appreciation and kudos rather than penalty.
(By “un-/controversial” I mean socially un-/controversial, not intellectually. By socially controversial I mean the sort of thing that will lead some people to escalate from the level of a truth-seeking discussion to the level of interpersonal conflict.)
It think it’s more a matter of temperament than conviction that I prefer the contribution framing to a respectful critique. (By “respectful” I mean respecting feelings, dignity, and individuality of the addressees, not authority/status. Such a respectful critique can be perfectly irreverent.) Both probably have various pros and cons in different contexts.
But one big advantage of the contribution framing seems to be that it makes the process of writing, review, and publishing a lot less stressful because it avoids antagonizing people – even though they ideally shouldn’t feel antagonized either way.
Another is evident in this comment section: The discussion is a wild mix of threads about community dynamics and actual object-level responses to the paper. Similarly I had trouble deciding whether to upvote or to strong-upvote the post: The paper touches on many topics, so naturally my thoughts about its object-level merits are all over the place. But I feel very strongly that, as community norms go, such respectful critiques are invaluable and ought to be strongly encouraged. Then again Simon Grimm’s suggestion to make a separate link-post for the object-level discussion would also address that.
But the critique framing seems to have the key advantage of a signal boost. I think Logan and Duncan observed that social posts generated a lot more engagement on Less Wrong than epistemic posts (which I haven’t tried to confirm), and Scott Alexander’s “Toxoplasma of Rage,” though a much more extreme case, seems to feed on similar dynamics. So maybe there are particular merits to the critique framing, at least when the content is so important that the community gains from the signal boost; it’s probably one of those powerful tools that ought to be handled with great care.
Are there heuristics for when a critique framing is warranted or even better than a contribution framing? Was it the correct choice to go for a critique framing in this case?
Sorry if this is a bit of a tangent but it seems possible to me to frame a lot of the ideas from the paper as wholly uncontroversial contributions to priorities research. In fact I remember a number of the ideas being raised in the spirit of contributions by various researchers over the years, for which they expected appreciation and kudos rather than penalty.
(By “un-/controversial” I mean socially un-/controversial, not intellectually. By socially controversial I mean the sort of thing that will lead some people to escalate from the level of a truth-seeking discussion to the level of interpersonal conflict.)
It think it’s more a matter of temperament than conviction that I prefer the contribution framing to a respectful critique. (By “respectful” I mean respecting feelings, dignity, and individuality of the addressees, not authority/status. Such a respectful critique can be perfectly irreverent.) Both probably have various pros and cons in different contexts.
But one big advantage of the contribution framing seems to be that it makes the process of writing, review, and publishing a lot less stressful because it avoids antagonizing people – even though they ideally shouldn’t feel antagonized either way.
Another is evident in this comment section: The discussion is a wild mix of threads about community dynamics and actual object-level responses to the paper. Similarly I had trouble deciding whether to upvote or to strong-upvote the post: The paper touches on many topics, so naturally my thoughts about its object-level merits are all over the place. But I feel very strongly that, as community norms go, such respectful critiques are invaluable and ought to be strongly encouraged. Then again Simon Grimm’s suggestion to make a separate link-post for the object-level discussion would also address that.
But the critique framing seems to have the key advantage of a signal boost. I think Logan and Duncan observed that social posts generated a lot more engagement on Less Wrong than epistemic posts (which I haven’t tried to confirm), and Scott Alexander’s “Toxoplasma of Rage,” though a much more extreme case, seems to feed on similar dynamics. So maybe there are particular merits to the critique framing, at least when the content is so important that the community gains from the signal boost; it’s probably one of those powerful tools that ought to be handled with great care.
Are there heuristics for when a critique framing is warranted or even better than a contribution framing? Was it the correct choice to go for a critique framing in this case?