I agree that it’s difficult (practically impossible) to engage with a criticism of the form “I don’t find your examples compelling”, because such a criticism is in some sense opaque: there’s very little you can do with the information provided, except possibly add more examples (which is time-consuming, and also might not even work if the additional examples you choose happen to be “uncompelling” in the same way as your original examples).
However, there is a deeper point to be made here: presumably you yourself only arrived at your position after some amount of consideration. The fact that others appear to find your arguments (including any examples you used) uncompelling, then, usually indicates one of two things:
You have not successfully expressed the full chain of reasoning that led you to originally adopt your conclusion (owing perhaps to constraints on time, effort, issues with legibility, or strategic concerns). In this case, you should be unsurprised at the fact that other people don’t appear to be convinced by your post, since your post does not present the same arguments/evidence that convinced you yourself to believe your position.
You do, in fact, find the raw examples in your post persuasive. This would then indicate that any disagreement between you and your readers is due to differing priors, i.e. evidence that you would consider sufficient to convince yourself of something, does not likewise convince others. Ideally, this fact should cause you to update in favor of the possibility that you are mistaken, at least if you believe that your interlocutors are being rational and intellectually honest.
I don’t know which of these two possibilities it actually is, but it may be worth keeping this in mind if you make a post that a bunch of people seem to disagree with.
I agree that it’s difficult (practically impossible) to engage with a criticism of the form “I don’t find your examples compelling”, because such a criticism is in some sense opaque: there’s very little you can do with the information provided, except possibly add more examples (which is time-consuming, and also might not even work if the additional examples you choose happen to be “uncompelling” in the same way as your original examples).
However, there is a deeper point to be made here: presumably you yourself only arrived at your position after some amount of consideration. The fact that others appear to find your arguments (including any examples you used) uncompelling, then, usually indicates one of two things:
You have not successfully expressed the full chain of reasoning that led you to originally adopt your conclusion (owing perhaps to constraints on time, effort, issues with legibility, or strategic concerns). In this case, you should be unsurprised at the fact that other people don’t appear to be convinced by your post, since your post does not present the same arguments/evidence that convinced you yourself to believe your position.
You do, in fact, find the raw examples in your post persuasive. This would then indicate that any disagreement between you and your readers is due to differing priors, i.e. evidence that you would consider sufficient to convince yourself of something, does not likewise convince others. Ideally, this fact should cause you to update in favor of the possibility that you are mistaken, at least if you believe that your interlocutors are being rational and intellectually honest.
I don’t know which of these two possibilities it actually is, but it may be worth keeping this in mind if you make a post that a bunch of people seem to disagree with.