Aww thanks Duncan :) I am v happy that I wrote my comments :)
I had noticed in the past that you seemed to have a different empirical belief here (or something), leading you to seem to have arguments in the comments that I myself wouldn’t care enough to follow through on (even while you made good and helpful arguments).
Maybe it’s just an empirical disagreement. But I can imagine doing some empirical test here where you convince me the majority of readers didn’t understand the norms as much as I thought, but where I still had a feeling like “As long as your posts score high in the annual review it doesn’t matter” or “As long as you get substantive responses from John Wentworth or Scott Alexander or Anna Salamon it doesn’t matter” or “As long as all the people are reading your ideas are picking them up and then suddenly everyone is talking about ‘cruxes’ all the time it doesn’t matter” (or “As long as I think your content is awesome and want to build offices and grant infrastructure and so on to support you and writers-like-you it doesn’t matter”).
I’d be interested to know if there are any things that you can think of that would change how you feel about this conversational norm on the margin? My random babble (of ideas that I am not saying are even net positive) would include suggesting a change to the commenting guidelines, or me doing a little survey of users about how they read comments, or me somehow writing a top level post where I flagrantly write true and valuable stuff that can be interpreted badly yet I don’t care and also there’s great discussion in the comments ;)
I happen to be writing exactly this essay (things that would change stuff on the margin). It’s … not easy.
As for exploring the empirical question, I’m interested/intrigued and cannot rule out that you’re just right about the line of “mattering” being somewhere other than where I guess it is.
Aww thanks Duncan :) I am v happy that I wrote my comments :)
I had noticed in the past that you seemed to have a different empirical belief here (or something), leading you to seem to have arguments in the comments that I myself wouldn’t care enough to follow through on (even while you made good and helpful arguments).
Maybe it’s just an empirical disagreement. But I can imagine doing some empirical test here where you convince me the majority of readers didn’t understand the norms as much as I thought, but where I still had a feeling like “As long as your posts score high in the annual review it doesn’t matter” or “As long as you get substantive responses from John Wentworth or Scott Alexander or Anna Salamon it doesn’t matter” or “As long as all the people are reading your ideas are picking them up and then suddenly everyone is talking about ‘cruxes’ all the time it doesn’t matter” (or “As long as I think your content is awesome and want to build offices and grant infrastructure and so on to support you and writers-like-you it doesn’t matter”).
I’d be interested to know if there are any things that you can think of that would change how you feel about this conversational norm on the margin? My random babble (of ideas that I am not saying are even net positive) would include suggesting a change to the commenting guidelines, or me doing a little survey of users about how they read comments, or me somehow writing a top level post where I flagrantly write true and valuable stuff that can be interpreted badly yet I don’t care and also there’s great discussion in the comments ;)
I happen to be writing exactly this essay (things that would change stuff on the margin). It’s … not easy.
As for exploring the empirical question, I’m interested/intrigued and cannot rule out that you’re just right about the line of “mattering” being somewhere other than where I guess it is.