...it still helps move the conversation forward by clarifying where the debate is at.
Anything Nate writes would do that, because he’s one of the debaters, right? He could have written “It’s a stupid post and I’m not going to read it”, literally just that one sentence, and it would still tell us something surprising about the debate. In some ways that post would be better than the one we got: it’s shorter, and much clearer about how much work he put in. But I would still downvote it, and I imagine you would too. Even allowing for the value of the debate itself, the bar is higher than that.
For me, that bar is at least as high as “read the whole article before replying to it”. If you don’t have time to read an article that’s totally fine, but then you don’t have time to post about it either.
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”.