I also suspect Ray isn’t either, and isn’t saying that in his post, but it’s a long post, so I might have missed something.
Explicitly chiming in clarify that yes, this is exactly my concern.
I only dedicated a couple paragraphs to this (search for “Incentivizing Good Ideas and Good Criticism”) because there were a lot of different things to talk about, but a central crux of mine is that, while much of the criticism you’ll on on LW is good, a sizeable chunk of it is just a waste of a time and/or actively harmful.
I want better criticism, and I think the central disagreement is something like Said/Cousin_it and a couple others disagreeing strongly with me/Oli/Ben about what makes useful criticism.
(To clarify, I also think that many criticisms in the Circling thread were quite good. For example, it’s very important to determine whether Circling is training introspection/empathy (extrospection?), or ‘just’ inducing hypnosis. This is important both within and without the paradigm that Unreal was describing of using Circling as a tool for epistemic rationality. But, a fair chunk of the comments just seemed to me to express raw bewilderment or hostility in a way that took up a lot of conversational space without moving anything forward.)
Explicitly chiming in clarify that yes, this is exactly my concern.
I only dedicated a couple paragraphs to this (search for “Incentivizing Good Ideas and Good Criticism”) because there were a lot of different things to talk about, but a central crux of mine is that, while much of the criticism you’ll on on LW is good, a sizeable chunk of it is just a waste of a time and/or actively harmful.
I want better criticism, and I think the central disagreement is something like Said/Cousin_it and a couple others disagreeing strongly with me/Oli/Ben about what makes useful criticism.
(To clarify, I also think that many criticisms in the Circling thread were quite good. For example, it’s very important to determine whether Circling is training introspection/empathy (extrospection?), or ‘just’ inducing hypnosis. This is important both within and without the paradigm that Unreal was describing of using Circling as a tool for epistemic rationality. But, a fair chunk of the comments just seemed to me to express raw
bewilderment or hostility in a way that took up a lot of conversational space without moving anything forward.)