First, I think promoting and encouraging higher standards is, if you’ll pardon the idiom, doing God’s work.
Thank you.
I’m so appreciative any time any member of a community looks to promote and encourage higher standards. It takes a lot of work and gets a lot of pushback and I’m always super appreciative when I see someone work at it.
Second, and on a much smaller note, if I might offer some......… stylistic feedback?
I’m only speaking here about my personal experience and heuristics. I’m not speaking for anyone else. One of my heuristics — which I darn well know isn’t perfectly accurate, but it’s nevertheless a heuristic I implicitly use all the time and which I know others use — is looking at language choices made when doing a quick skim of a piece as a first-pass filter of the writer’s credibility.
It’s often inaccurate. I know it. Still, I do it.
Your writing sometimes, when you care about an issue, seems to veer very slightly into resembling the writing of someone who is heated up about a topic in a way that leads to less productive and coherent thought.
This leads my default reaction to discounting the credibility of the message slightly.
I have to forcibly remind myself not to do that in your case, since you’re actually taking pretty cohesive and intelligent positions.
As a small example:
These are all terrible ideas.
These are all
terrible
ideas.
I’m going to say it a third time, because LessWrong is not yet a place where I can rely on my reputation for saying what I actually mean and then expect to be treated as if I meant the thing that I actually said: I recognize that these are terrible ideas.
I just — umm, in my personal… umm.… filters… it doesn’t look good on a skim pass. I’m not saying emulate soul-less garbage at the expense of clarity. Certainly not. I like your ideas a lot. I loved Concentration of Force.
I’m just saying that, on the margin, if you edited down some of the first-person language and strong expressions of affect a little bit in areas where you might be concerned about it being “not yet a place where I can rely on my reputation for saying what I actually mean”… it might help credibility.
I’ve written quite literally millions of words in my life, so I can say from firsthand experience that lines like that do successfully pre-empt stupid responses so you get less dumb comments.
That’s true.
But I think it’s likely you take anywhere from a 10% to 50% penalty to credibility to many casual skimmers of threads who do not ever bother to comment (which, incidentally, is both the majority of readers and me personally in 2021).
I see things like the excerpted part, and I have to consciously remind myself not to apply a credibility discount to what you’re saying, because (in my experience and perhaps unfairly) I pattern match that style to less credible people and less credible writing.
Again, this is just a friendly stylistic note. I consider myself a fan. If I’m mistaken or it’d be expensive to implement an editing filter for toning that down, don’t bother — it’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, and I’m really happy someone is working on this.
I suppose I’m just trying to improve the good guys’ effectiveness for concentration of force reasons, you could say.
First, I think promoting and encouraging higher standards is, if you’ll pardon the idiom, doing God’s work.
Thank you.
I’m so appreciative any time any member of a community looks to promote and encourage higher standards. It takes a lot of work and gets a lot of pushback and I’m always super appreciative when I see someone work at it.
Second, and on a much smaller note, if I might offer some......… stylistic feedback?
I’m only speaking here about my personal experience and heuristics. I’m not speaking for anyone else. One of my heuristics — which I darn well know isn’t perfectly accurate, but it’s nevertheless a heuristic I implicitly use all the time and which I know others use — is looking at language choices made when doing a quick skim of a piece as a first-pass filter of the writer’s credibility.
It’s often inaccurate. I know it. Still, I do it.
Your writing sometimes, when you care about an issue, seems to veer very slightly into resembling the writing of someone who is heated up about a topic in a way that leads to less productive and coherent thought.
This leads my default reaction to discounting the credibility of the message slightly.
I have to forcibly remind myself not to do that in your case, since you’re actually taking pretty cohesive and intelligent positions.
As a small example:
I just — umm, in my personal… umm.… filters… it doesn’t look good on a skim pass. I’m not saying emulate soul-less garbage at the expense of clarity. Certainly not. I like your ideas a lot. I loved Concentration of Force.
I’m just saying that, on the margin, if you edited down some of the first-person language and strong expressions of affect a little bit in areas where you might be concerned about it being “not yet a place where I can rely on my reputation for saying what I actually mean”… it might help credibility.
I’ve written quite literally millions of words in my life, so I can say from firsthand experience that lines like that do successfully pre-empt stupid responses so you get less dumb comments.
That’s true.
But I think it’s likely you take anywhere from a 10% to 50% penalty to credibility to many casual skimmers of threads who do not ever bother to comment (which, incidentally, is both the majority of readers and me personally in 2021).
I see things like the excerpted part, and I have to consciously remind myself not to apply a credibility discount to what you’re saying, because (in my experience and perhaps unfairly) I pattern match that style to less credible people and less credible writing.
Again, this is just a friendly stylistic note. I consider myself a fan. If I’m mistaken or it’d be expensive to implement an editing filter for toning that down, don’t bother — it’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, and I’m really happy someone is working on this.
I suppose I’m just trying to improve the good guys’ effectiveness for concentration of force reasons, you could say.
Salut and thanks again.
Thanks. =)