To summarize, the best kind of criticism is proposing small improvements (“constructive criticism”), because it gives new ideas a chance to grow before they compete with conventional ones. That seems insightful and I agree, thanks for writing that! Even when an idea is so broken that small tweaks won’t help, like a perpetual motion machine, it might be useful to take a cue from the trisector article and find some way in which the idea succeeds, conspicuously ignoring the ways in which it fails. An extreme form of that technique is called “fogging” and it’s hilarious to use.
To summarize, the best kind of criticism is proposing small improvements (“constructive criticism”), because it gives new ideas a chance to grow before they compete with conventional ones. That seems insightful and I agree, thanks for writing that! Even when an idea is so broken that small tweaks won’t help, like a perpetual motion machine, it might be useful to take a cue from the trisector article and find some way in which the idea succeeds, conspicuously ignoring the ways in which it fails. An extreme form of that technique is called “fogging” and it’s hilarious to use.