Note: I have a feeling that ‘policing tone’ is an annoying meme for a forum and something more appropriate for moderators than for readers so I’ll post this one and default to refraining from doing it again.
Quick few thoughts on the tone of this, feel free to ignore if it doesn’t change your mind:
Most of these articles have been good but this one is certainly the worst out of all that I have seen (n=25 or so, from multiple writers) and I believe it has negative expected value.
This part, right at the top and at a few other points, I felt a little uncomfortable. If I were the author and I read this, I feel like I would feel more ‘attacked by my allies’ than ‘constructively critiqued’.
I feel like some quick changes to the tone, particularly early on (e.g., ‘I found this one distasteful’ rather than ‘this is the worst I’ve seen’) feels less aggressive. Perhaps adding an extra paragraph at the beginning saying a few positive things about their column in general (if you have those views) and saying that you only mean your comments in a constructive way. Personally, that would be enough for me to take the feedback well. Maybe no one on their team reads it, maybe one person reads it and forwards it to the whole team. Seems worth assuming the latter is the case and it’s that scenario that prompted me to make this comment.
Given in particular that Future Perfect is not funded by donors that explicitly identify with EA ideas and that run by Vox, my quick guess is that careful constructive criticism is far more valuable / low risk than more assertive / slightly aggressive criticism (apologies if I’m already preaching to the choir here). I’m currently still really glad that Vox, Ezra etc., have chosen to do this column taking lots of EA ideas into account.
Funnily enough I had a similar opinion about one of the mobile thumbnails for their anti-mars piece. The thumbnail read “Elon wants to go to Mars, here’s why that’s a bad idea” which didn’t seem worth it.
For whatever it’s worth, I read “I found this one distasteful” as more aggressive than “This is the worst of the 25 articles, most of which were good”. One article has to be the worst after all, and so that sentence alone might not even be a real criticism. I see the actual criticism in the next half-sentence “and believe it has negative expected value”, which feels to me pretty non-aggressive.
I understand disagreement about how harsh or gentle of a tone is appropriate here, but we must at least accept the clear expression of extreme rankings lest we lose the ability to share meaningful credences. We should not make it impossible or overly difficult to say that something is the worst, or that we are certain about that fact, because sometimes a thing really is the worst (SOMETHING must be! It’s trivially true, assuming ordering!) and losing that information will bias us. If you ever find yourself writing from a similar position to mine, I’d urge you to find a graceful way to express your belief that something has negative expected value and is inferior to all the other things, and make sure that you aren’t moderating yourself to expressing positivity or uncertainty which you do not really believe.
I want to make it clear that I would express these beliefs with more grace and cushioning to an author who I could give the benefit of the doubt (e.g., Kelsey Piper, or a source I had never seen before). My approach here is partially informed by Matthews and Vox’s track record, they have been criticized before.
I hope my early, explicit statement that most of their articles are good makes it clear that I don’t wish for Matthews or Vox to be run out of this whole thing. And hopefully it’s implicit that I don’t really worry about similar articles that they write in non-EA contexts, I just file that into the bin of permissible propaganda. So all I have to do is lead them to coming up with the very easy compromise of keeping this sort of thing on the other parts of their site, which means that (a) a stiff response won’t back them into a corner, and (b) I don’t have to complete the Sisyphean task of truly changing their minds about conservatives in America.
Given in particular that Future Perfect is not funded by donors that explicitly identify with EA ideas and that run by Vox, my quick guess is that careful constructive criticism is far more valuable / low risk than more assertive / slightly aggressive criticism (apologies if I’m already preaching to the choir here).
Good point, but Vox feels this risk as well, which is why a response like this will encourage them to take the easy compromise rather than face the risk.
(Also, since Matthews’s own opinion is that across-the-aisle friendship is overrated, and that “airing grievances” can be a good learning experience, surely I get a bit of extra leeway here.)
Note: I have a feeling that ‘policing tone’ is an annoying meme for a forum and something more appropriate for moderators than for readers so I’ll post this one and default to refraining from doing it again.
Quick few thoughts on the tone of this, feel free to ignore if it doesn’t change your mind:
This part, right at the top and at a few other points, I felt a little uncomfortable. If I were the author and I read this, I feel like I would feel more ‘attacked by my allies’ than ‘constructively critiqued’.
I feel like some quick changes to the tone, particularly early on (e.g., ‘I found this one distasteful’ rather than ‘this is the worst I’ve seen’) feels less aggressive. Perhaps adding an extra paragraph at the beginning saying a few positive things about their column in general (if you have those views) and saying that you only mean your comments in a constructive way. Personally, that would be enough for me to take the feedback well. Maybe no one on their team reads it, maybe one person reads it and forwards it to the whole team. Seems worth assuming the latter is the case and it’s that scenario that prompted me to make this comment.
Given in particular that Future Perfect is not funded by donors that explicitly identify with EA ideas and that run by Vox, my quick guess is that careful constructive criticism is far more valuable / low risk than more assertive / slightly aggressive criticism (apologies if I’m already preaching to the choir here). I’m currently still really glad that Vox, Ezra etc., have chosen to do this column taking lots of EA ideas into account.
Funnily enough I had a similar opinion about one of the mobile thumbnails for their anti-mars piece. The thumbnail read “Elon wants to go to Mars, here’s why that’s a bad idea” which didn’t seem worth it.
For whatever it’s worth, I read “I found this one distasteful” as more aggressive than “This is the worst of the 25 articles, most of which were good”. One article has to be the worst after all, and so that sentence alone might not even be a real criticism. I see the actual criticism in the next half-sentence “and believe it has negative expected value”, which feels to me pretty non-aggressive.
I understand disagreement about how harsh or gentle of a tone is appropriate here, but we must at least accept the clear expression of extreme rankings lest we lose the ability to share meaningful credences. We should not make it impossible or overly difficult to say that something is the worst, or that we are certain about that fact, because sometimes a thing really is the worst (SOMETHING must be! It’s trivially true, assuming ordering!) and losing that information will bias us. If you ever find yourself writing from a similar position to mine, I’d urge you to find a graceful way to express your belief that something has negative expected value and is inferior to all the other things, and make sure that you aren’t moderating yourself to expressing positivity or uncertainty which you do not really believe.
I want to make it clear that I would express these beliefs with more grace and cushioning to an author who I could give the benefit of the doubt (e.g., Kelsey Piper, or a source I had never seen before). My approach here is partially informed by Matthews and Vox’s track record, they have been criticized before.
I hope my early, explicit statement that most of their articles are good makes it clear that I don’t wish for Matthews or Vox to be run out of this whole thing. And hopefully it’s implicit that I don’t really worry about similar articles that they write in non-EA contexts, I just file that into the bin of permissible propaganda. So all I have to do is lead them to coming up with the very easy compromise of keeping this sort of thing on the other parts of their site, which means that (a) a stiff response won’t back them into a corner, and (b) I don’t have to complete the Sisyphean task of truly changing their minds about conservatives in America.
Good point, but Vox feels this risk as well, which is why a response like this will encourage them to take the easy compromise rather than face the risk.
(Also, since Matthews’s own opinion is that across-the-aisle friendship is overrated, and that “airing grievances” can be a good learning experience, surely I get a bit of extra leeway here.)