I think for many people, positive comments would be much less meaningful if they were rewarded/quantified, because you would doubt that they’re genuine. (Especially if you excessively feel like an imposter and easily seize onto reasons to dismiss praise.)
I disagree with your recommendations despite agreeing that positive comments are undersupplied.
I’d quickly flag: 1. Any decent intervention should be done experimentally. It’s not like there would be “one system, hastily put-together, in place forever.” More like, early work would try out some things and see what the response is like in practice. I imagine that many original ideas would be mediocre, but with the right modifications and adjustments to feedback, it’s possible to make something decent. 2. I think that positive comments are often already rewarded—and that’s a major reason people give them. But I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. My quick guess is that this is a situation of adjusting incentives—certain incentive structures would encourage certain classes of good and bad behaviors, so it’s important to continue to tune these. Right now we have some basic incentives that were arrived at by default, and in my opinion are quite unsophisticated (people are incentivized to be extra nice to people who are powerful and who will respond, and mean to people in the outgroup). I think semi-intentional work can improve this, but I realize it would need to be done well.
On my side it feels a bit like, ”We currently have an ecosystem of very mediocre incentives, that produce the current results. It’s possible to set up infrastructure to adjust those incentives and experiment with what those results would be. I’m optimistic that this problem is both important enough and tractable enough for some good efforts to work on.”
I think for many people, positive comments would be much less meaningful if they were rewarded/quantified, because you would doubt that they’re genuine. (Especially if you excessively feel like an imposter and easily seize onto reasons to dismiss praise.)
I disagree with your recommendations despite agreeing that positive comments are undersupplied.
I’d quickly flag:
1. Any decent intervention should be done experimentally. It’s not like there would be “one system, hastily put-together, in place forever.” More like, early work would try out some things and see what the response is like in practice. I imagine that many original ideas would be mediocre, but with the right modifications and adjustments to feedback, it’s possible to make something decent.
2. I think that positive comments are often already rewarded—and that’s a major reason people give them. But I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. My quick guess is that this is a situation of adjusting incentives—certain incentive structures would encourage certain classes of good and bad behaviors, so it’s important to continue to tune these. Right now we have some basic incentives that were arrived at by default, and in my opinion are quite unsophisticated (people are incentivized to be extra nice to people who are powerful and who will respond, and mean to people in the outgroup). I think semi-intentional work can improve this, but I realize it would need to be done well.
On my side it feels a bit like,
”We currently have an ecosystem of very mediocre incentives, that produce the current results. It’s possible to set up infrastructure to adjust those incentives and experiment with what those results would be. I’m optimistic that this problem is both important enough and tractable enough for some good efforts to work on.”