Fairly often I will come across something on LW which is surprising / seems wrong to me. I will often do something of an epistemic spot check to check it.
If I conclude that the statement that I was investigating was incorrect then this will turn into a comment/review/post.
If the statement was correct then I’ve learnt something new.
But it slightly worries me that I never publish these findings. An analogy could be made to publication bias in scientific literature.
I feel like I should write a comment just to say “I checked X and found that it was true”. In addition to avoiding a kind of publication bias I suspect that if something is surprising to me then it will be to some other people and giving independent confirmation seems prosocial.
On the other hand writing on someone’s post “Yes, you are correct about that” comes across as quite arrogant, as if they needed my confirmation before they could be considered correct.
My proposed solution to this is to link to this comment when I do it and hope that this explains why I’m doing it.
I suspect that I’m not the only one who this happens to so in the long run it might be beneficial for this to become a community norm and then I wouldn’t have to link to this.
If anyone has a better solution or thinks I should just not bother with publishing these confirmations then I’d be interested to hear it.
I should say that I don’t know anyone from LW IRL and am sometimes more worried about accidentally violating norms. Anywhere other than LW I’d be confident that doing this kind of thing would be seen as a social faux-pas.
Obviously I’d like to think that LW would not have this issue. On the other hand I know that I’m communicating with humans so social reactions don’t always work like we’d want them to.
Edit: actually I’m not sure arrogant is the right word—more like just weird to write it up if your findings confirm the original claim, I don’t think I’ve seen this norm practiced in general.
If the only issue is tone, you could write something like: ‘Initially, I was confused/surprised by the core claim you made but reading this, this, and that [or thinking for 15 minutes/further research] made me believe that your position is basically correct’. This looks quite
[...] “Yes, you are correct about that” comes across as quite arrogant [...]
Hmm, I don’t think that’s what an upvote generally represents. An upvote is more of a general “I’d like to see more like this” rather than a specific “I researched this point and found it to be correct”.
Fairly often I will come across something on LW which is surprising / seems wrong to me. I will often do something of an epistemic spot check to check it.
If I conclude that the statement that I was investigating was incorrect then this will turn into a comment/review/post.
If the statement was correct then I’ve learnt something new.
But it slightly worries me that I never publish these findings. An analogy could be made to publication bias in scientific literature.
I feel like I should write a comment just to say “I checked X and found that it was true”. In addition to avoiding a kind of publication bias I suspect that if something is surprising to me then it will be to some other people and giving independent confirmation seems prosocial.
On the other hand writing on someone’s post “Yes, you are correct about that” comes across as quite arrogant, as if they needed my confirmation before they could be considered correct.
My proposed solution to this is to link to this comment when I do it and hope that this explains why I’m doing it.
I suspect that I’m not the only one who this happens to so in the long run it might be beneficial for this to become a community norm and then I wouldn’t have to link to this.
If anyone has a better solution or thinks I should just not bother with publishing these confirmations then I’d be interested to hear it.
I’m dismayed to hear that you think publicly double-checking someone’s claims might be too arrogant.
I’m more thinking of perceptions.
I should say that I don’t know anyone from LW IRL and am sometimes more worried about accidentally violating norms. Anywhere other than LW I’d be confident that doing this kind of thing would be seen as a social faux-pas.
Obviously I’d like to think that LW would not have this issue. On the other hand I know that I’m communicating with humans so social reactions don’t always work like we’d want them to.
Edit: actually I’m not sure arrogant is the right word—more like just weird to write it up if your findings confirm the original claim, I don’t think I’ve seen this norm practiced in general.
I would love to read more of such double-checking-this-claim by Bucky.
If the only issue is tone, you could write something like: ‘Initially, I was confused/surprised by the core claim you made but reading this, this, and that [or thinking for 15 minutes/further research] made me believe that your position is basically correct’. This looks quite
Isn’t that what the vote up button is for?
Hmm, I don’t think that’s what an upvote generally represents. An upvote is more of a general “I’d like to see more like this” rather than a specific “I researched this point and found it to be correct”.