Initially, I thought that your comment did not apply to me at all. I thought that most of the feedback that I get that is negative is actually of the form that the feedback is correct, but it was delivered incorrectly. But now that I think about it, it seems that most of the negative feedback that I get is based on that somebody does not understand what I am saying sufficiently. This might be in large part because I fail to explain it properly.
There are definitely instances though where people did point out big important holes in my reasoning. All of the people who did that were really competent I think. And they did point out things in such a way that I was like “Oh damm, this seems really important! I should have thought about this myself.” But I did not really get negative reinforcement at all from them. They usually pointed it out in a neutral philosopher style, where you talk about the content not the person. I think most of the negative feedback that I am talking about you would get when people don’t differentiate between the content and the person. You want to say “This idea does not work for reason X”. You don’t want to say “Your idea is terrible because you did not write it up well, and even if you had written up well, it seems to really not talk about anything important.”
Interestingly I get less and less negative feedback, on the same things I do. This is probably because of a selection effect where people who like what I do would stick around. However, another major factor seems to be that because I worked on what I do for so long, it gets easier and easier to explain. In the beginning, it is very illegible because it is mostly intuitions. And then as you cash out the intuitions things become more and more legible.
Initially, I thought that your comment did not apply to me at all. I thought that most of the feedback that I get that is negative is actually of the form that the feedback is correct, but it was delivered incorrectly. But now that I think about it, it seems that most of the negative feedback that I get is based on that somebody does not understand what I am saying sufficiently. This might be in large part because I fail to explain it properly.
There are definitely instances though where people did point out big important holes in my reasoning. All of the people who did that were really competent I think. And they did point out things in such a way that I was like “Oh damm, this seems really important! I should have thought about this myself.” But I did not really get negative reinforcement at all from them. They usually pointed it out in a neutral philosopher style, where you talk about the content not the person. I think most of the negative feedback that I am talking about you would get when people don’t differentiate between the content and the person. You want to say “This idea does not work for reason X”. You don’t want to say “Your idea is terrible because you did not write it up well, and even if you had written up well, it seems to really not talk about anything important.”
Interestingly I get less and less negative feedback, on the same things I do. This is probably because of a selection effect where people who like what I do would stick around. However, another major factor seems to be that because I worked on what I do for so long, it gets easier and easier to explain. In the beginning, it is very illegible because it is mostly intuitions. And then as you cash out the intuitions things become more and more legible.