One reason you might do something like “writing up a list but not publishing it” is if you perceive yourself to be in a mostly-learning mode rather than a mostly-contributing one. You don’t want to dilute the discussion with your thoughts that don’t have a particularly good chance of adding anything, and you don’t want to be written off as someone not worth listening to in a sticky way, but you want to write something down develop your understanding / check against future developments / record anything that might turn out to have value later after all once you understand better.
Of course, this isn’t necessarily an optimal or good strategy, and people might still do it when it isn’t—I’ve written down plenty of thoughts on alignment over the years, I think many of the actual-causal-reasons I’m a chronic lurker are pretty dumb and non-agentic—but I think people do reason like this, explicitly or implicitly.
There’s a connection here to concernedcitizen64′s point about your role as a community leader, inasmuch as your claims about the quality of the field can significantly influence people’s probabilities that their ideas are useful / that they should be in a contributing mode, but IMO it’s more generally about people’s confidence in their contributions.
Overall I’d personally guess “all the usual reasons people don’t publish their thoughts” over “fear of the reception of disagreement with high-status people” as the bigger factor here; I think the culture of LW is pretty good at conveying that high-quality criticism is appreciated.
One reason you might do something like “writing up a list but not publishing it” is if you perceive yourself to be in a mostly-learning mode rather than a mostly-contributing one. You don’t want to dilute the discussion with your thoughts that don’t have a particularly good chance of adding anything, and you don’t want to be written off as someone not worth listening to in a sticky way, but you want to write something down develop your understanding / check against future developments / record anything that might turn out to have value later after all once you understand better.
Of course, this isn’t necessarily an optimal or good strategy, and people might still do it when it isn’t—I’ve written down plenty of thoughts on alignment over the years, I think many of the actual-causal-reasons I’m a chronic lurker are pretty dumb and non-agentic—but I think people do reason like this, explicitly or implicitly.
There’s a connection here to concernedcitizen64′s point about your role as a community leader, inasmuch as your claims about the quality of the field can significantly influence people’s probabilities that their ideas are useful / that they should be in a contributing mode, but IMO it’s more generally about people’s confidence in their contributions.
Overall I’d personally guess “all the usual reasons people don’t publish their thoughts” over “fear of the reception of disagreement with high-status people” as the bigger factor here; I think the culture of LW is pretty good at conveying that high-quality criticism is appreciated.
(I mostly endorse this explanation, but am also writing a reply with some more details.)