That’s not what I’m saying. Most information is not consumed by randomly selecting packets, so optimizing for that kind of consumption is pretty useless. In writing a comment here it’s fine to assume people have read the original post and the chain of parent comments, and generally fine to assume they’ve read the rest of the comments. On the other hand “top level” things are often read individually, and there I do think putting more thought into how it stands on its own is worth it.
Even setting aside the epistemic benefits of making it more likely that someone will see both the original post and the response, though, the social benefits are significant. I think a heads up is still worth it even if we only consider how the org will be under strong pressure to respond immediately once the criticism is public, and the negative effects that has on the people responsible for producing that response.
I dunno man. If I imagine someone who’s sort of peripheral to EA but knows a lot about X, and they see EA org-X doing silly stuff with X, and they write a detailed post, only to have it downvoted due to the norm… I expect that to cut off useful information far more than prevent {misconceptions among people who would have otherwise had usefully true and detailed models}.
I agree that would be pretty bad. This is a norm I’m pushing for people within the EA community, though, and I don’t think we should be applying it to external criticism? For example, when a Swedish newspaper reported that FLI had committed to fund a pro-nazi group this was cross-posted to the forum. I don’t think downvoting that discussion on the basis that FLI hadn’t had a chance to respond yet would have been reasonable at all.
I also don’t think downvoting is a good way of handling violations of this norm. Instead I want to build the norm positively, by people including at the ends of their posts “I sent a draft to org for review” and orgs saying “thanks for giving us time to prepare a response” in their responses. To the extent that there’s any negative enforcement I like Jason’s suggestion, that posts where the subject didn’t get advance notice could get a pinned mod comment.
That’s not what I’m saying. Most information is not consumed by randomly selecting packets, so optimizing for that kind of consumption is pretty useless. In writing a comment here it’s fine to assume people have read the original post and the chain of parent comments, and generally fine to assume they’ve read the rest of the comments. On the other hand “top level” things are often read individually, and there I do think putting more thought into how it stands on its own is worth it.
Even setting aside the epistemic benefits of making it more likely that someone will see both the original post and the response, though, the social benefits are significant. I think a heads up is still worth it even if we only consider how the org will be under strong pressure to respond immediately once the criticism is public, and the negative effects that has on the people responsible for producing that response.
I dunno man. If I imagine someone who’s sort of peripheral to EA but knows a lot about X, and they see EA org-X doing silly stuff with X, and they write a detailed post, only to have it downvoted due to the norm… I expect that to cut off useful information far more than prevent {misconceptions among people who would have otherwise had usefully true and detailed models}.
I agree that would be pretty bad. This is a norm I’m pushing for people within the EA community, though, and I don’t think we should be applying it to external criticism? For example, when a Swedish newspaper reported that FLI had committed to fund a pro-nazi group this was cross-posted to the forum. I don’t think downvoting that discussion on the basis that FLI hadn’t had a chance to respond yet would have been reasonable at all.
I also don’t think downvoting is a good way of handling violations of this norm. Instead I want to build the norm positively, by people including at the ends of their posts “I sent a draft to org for review” and orgs saying “thanks for giving us time to prepare a response” in their responses. To the extent that there’s any negative enforcement I like Jason’s suggestion, that posts where the subject didn’t get advance notice could get a pinned mod comment.