I remember the opposite extreme from my socialist youth. The keywords were “constructive criticism”. The idea was that you are not allowed to complain against any negative aspect of the existing solution, unless you can design a 100% functional alternative from the scratch (which needs to be approved by the people currently in power, who by the way are allowed to provide non-constructive criticism against your solution).
Shortly, you were not allowed to criticize anything, but it was said in a way that made it your fault for being an incompetent critic. See, the regime is open to honest criticism! We only punish the trolls...
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Now of course there are two different things. Can you list the negatives of the existing solution? Can you design a better solution? Both are legitimate questions, but we should not treat them as synonyms.
It can be that the current system has disadvantages, but no one can design a Pareto improvement, and all things considered maybe we should keep it. Still, the disadvantages are worth noting.
It can also be that the current system has disadvantages, a clear improvement is possible, but the person who is hurt by the current disadvantages is not qualified to design the improvement… but they can provide feedback about how the current system is hurting them, a data point that other people might not notice.
So I guess we should clearly separate the “providing feedback” phase from the “designing an alternative” phase. On one hand, lack of designing ability should not be used as an excuse to dismiss feedback. On the other hand, negative feedback should not be taken as a proof that a better option is (trivially) possible.
I remember the opposite extreme from my socialist youth. The keywords were “constructive criticism”. The idea was that you are not allowed to complain against any negative aspect of the existing solution, unless you can design a 100% functional alternative from the scratch (which needs to be approved by the people currently in power, who by the way are allowed to provide non-constructive criticism against your solution).
Which is especially ironic from socialists because if there’s a poster boy for “correct in pointing out the issues with the status quo, pretty shit pie-in-the-sky proposed solution”, I’d say it’s Karl Marx.
But yeah, ideally you’d need to balance the two things. At the very least if all you can do is provide feedback, do so in a precise enough manner that people can work out a solution even if you can’t (for example, define by what metric you would consider the problem solved rather than leaving yourself open a path to be perpetually aggrieved by moving the goalposts).
If I complain at a restaurant that the soup is too salty, and the cook makes a new one, and now I complain that this one is too spicy (let’s assume the previous one was not), am I moving the goalpost?
I don’t know how to define the rules for what is proper criticism. Sometimes the utility function is too complex to express clearly. (And sometimes the person just sucks at expressing themselves clearly.)
On the other hand, if a situation is inherently a tradeoff between X and Y, and the person says “too much X” and later “too much Y”, it makes sense to tell them “hey, we all know that this is a tradeoff between X and Y, so either tell us what proportion of X to Y you want, or shut up”. (Then again, the person might challenge the idea that the tradeoff is inevitable. But better if they do it explicitly, rather than just complaining about X one day, and about Y the other day.)
On the meta level, it’s the same problem again—I can’t give you the proper rules for criticism, but I can say when I feel that people are going too far in certain direction. So I am unconstructively criticizing the very idea of criticism, heh.
I remember the opposite extreme from my socialist youth. The keywords were “constructive criticism”. The idea was that you are not allowed to complain against any negative aspect of the existing solution, unless you can design a 100% functional alternative from the scratch (which needs to be approved by the people currently in power, who by the way are allowed to provide non-constructive criticism against your solution).
Shortly, you were not allowed to criticize anything, but it was said in a way that made it your fault for being an incompetent critic. See, the regime is open to honest criticism! We only punish the trolls...
*
Now of course there are two different things. Can you list the negatives of the existing solution? Can you design a better solution? Both are legitimate questions, but we should not treat them as synonyms.
It can be that the current system has disadvantages, but no one can design a Pareto improvement, and all things considered maybe we should keep it. Still, the disadvantages are worth noting.
It can also be that the current system has disadvantages, a clear improvement is possible, but the person who is hurt by the current disadvantages is not qualified to design the improvement… but they can provide feedback about how the current system is hurting them, a data point that other people might not notice.
So I guess we should clearly separate the “providing feedback” phase from the “designing an alternative” phase. On one hand, lack of designing ability should not be used as an excuse to dismiss feedback. On the other hand, negative feedback should not be taken as a proof that a better option is (trivially) possible.
Which is especially ironic from socialists because if there’s a poster boy for “correct in pointing out the issues with the status quo, pretty shit pie-in-the-sky proposed solution”, I’d say it’s Karl Marx.
But yeah, ideally you’d need to balance the two things. At the very least if all you can do is provide feedback, do so in a precise enough manner that people can work out a solution even if you can’t (for example, define by what metric you would consider the problem solved rather than leaving yourself open a path to be perpetually aggrieved by moving the goalposts).
If I complain at a restaurant that the soup is too salty, and the cook makes a new one, and now I complain that this one is too spicy (let’s assume the previous one was not), am I moving the goalpost?
I don’t know how to define the rules for what is proper criticism. Sometimes the utility function is too complex to express clearly. (And sometimes the person just sucks at expressing themselves clearly.)
On the other hand, if a situation is inherently a tradeoff between X and Y, and the person says “too much X” and later “too much Y”, it makes sense to tell them “hey, we all know that this is a tradeoff between X and Y, so either tell us what proportion of X to Y you want, or shut up”. (Then again, the person might challenge the idea that the tradeoff is inevitable. But better if they do it explicitly, rather than just complaining about X one day, and about Y the other day.)
On the meta level, it’s the same problem again—I can’t give you the proper rules for criticism, but I can say when I feel that people are going too far in certain direction. So I am unconstructively criticizing the very idea of criticism, heh.