When there is no transparency about why people exit discussions, it allows for them to leave due to bias, dodging, bad reasons, etc., and it’s not very provable.
Right, so my very first comment in this thread pointed out a way you could collect evidence on this question. You can look for patterns. If a particular user has a habit of dropping out of threads when they seem to be “losing”, then that’s evidence that they’re doing so to evade arguments and dodge questions. If LW users as a group have a habit of doing that, it’s also evidence that that’s a common reason people do it.
But as far as I can tell you haven’t looked for evidence like that, either for individual users or for LW as a whole. When I asked if we have this problem, you didn’t point to patterns. You just pointed to individual instances of people stopping replying for unclear reasons. But there are plenty of reasons someone might stop replying.
And so I still have to wonder: do we in practice have this problem on LW? Is it in fact common here for people to leave discussions to evade arguments and dodge questions? You’ve given me no reason to think it is.
(Of course it would be super duper surprising if no one had ever done that. So perhaps we should be asking questions like “how often does it happen here, how bad is it when it happens, what does it trade off against, how much would it be worth to make a marginal improvement”. Maybe your full post is more nuanced about things like that, but your description of the problem so far has seemed fairly… black-and-white? When remizidae pointed out that there were tradeoffs, you asked them if they could propose solutions. Whether they can propose solutions or not doesn’t change the fact that there are tradeoffs. So far in this thread I haven’t seen you acknowledge the tradeoffs.)
Something I notice is that… so far, this subthread seems to have been entirely useless, and it’s taking a lot more energy than most of the comments I write on LW. I’ll still give one more response, but...
This feels mean, and I don’t like that, but it also feels like an important part of what’s going on for me right now and relevant to the conversation and I don’t want to dance around it, so, uh, here goes I guess: to be frank, I don’t blame people for stopping replying to you.
Right, so my very first comment in this thread pointed out a way you could collect evidence on this question. You can look for patterns. If a particular user has a habit of dropping out of threads when they seem to be “losing”, then that’s evidence that they’re doing so to evade arguments and dodge questions. If LW users as a group have a habit of doing that, it’s also evidence that that’s a common reason people do it.
But as far as I can tell you haven’t looked for evidence like that, either for individual users or for LW as a whole. When I asked if we have this problem, you didn’t point to patterns. You just pointed to individual instances of people stopping replying for unclear reasons. But there are plenty of reasons someone might stop replying.
And so I still have to wonder: do we in practice have this problem on LW? Is it in fact common here for people to leave discussions to evade arguments and dodge questions? You’ve given me no reason to think it is.
(Of course it would be super duper surprising if no one had ever done that. So perhaps we should be asking questions like “how often does it happen here, how bad is it when it happens, what does it trade off against, how much would it be worth to make a marginal improvement”. Maybe your full post is more nuanced about things like that, but your description of the problem so far has seemed fairly… black-and-white? When remizidae pointed out that there were tradeoffs, you asked them if they could propose solutions. Whether they can propose solutions or not doesn’t change the fact that there are tradeoffs. So far in this thread I haven’t seen you acknowledge the tradeoffs.)
Something I notice is that… so far, this subthread seems to have been entirely useless, and it’s taking a lot more energy than most of the comments I write on LW. I’ll still give one more response, but...
This feels mean, and I don’t like that, but it also feels like an important part of what’s going on for me right now and relevant to the conversation and I don’t want to dance around it, so, uh, here goes I guess: to be frank, I don’t blame people for stopping replying to you.