I wish this had been called “Duncan’s Guidelines for Discourse” or something like that. I like most of the guidelines given, but they’re not consensus. And while I support Duncan’s right to block people from his posts (and agree with him far on discourse norms far more than with the people he blocked), it means that people who disagree with him on the rules can’t make their case in the comments. That feels like an unbalanced playing field to me.
Also just on priors, consider how unproductive and messy, mostly talking about who said what and analyzing virtues of participants, the conversation caused by this post and its author was. I think even without reading it it’s an indicator of somewhat doubtful origin for a set of prescriptivist guidelines.
I think that Duncan was not aspiring to set his own preferred standards, but to figure out the best standards for truth-seeking discourse. I might agree that he did not perfectly succeed, but I’m not sure this means all attempts, if deemed not perfectly successful, should be called “My Guidelines for My Preferred Discourse”.
I see. I agree it makes the strength of discourse here weaker, and agree that the people blocked were specifically people who have disagreements about the standards to aspire to in large group discourse. I am grateful that at least one of the people has engaged well elsewhere, and have written a review encouraging people to positively vote on that post (I gave it +4). While I do think it’s likely some valid criticisms of content within the posts have been missed as a result of such silencing effects under Duncan’s posts, I feel confident enough that there’s a lot of valuable content that I still think it deserves to score highly in the review.
Yeah, I’m not making any object level claims about this post one way or another, just thinking about the general principles.
Thinking a bit more:
I think the Review does fairly naturally make a schelling time for people to write up more top-level responses on things they disagree with. I think it’s probably important for it to be possible to write reviews on posts during the Review unless the author specifically removes it from consideration in the Review (which maybe should be special-cased, and doesn’t mean people can write more back-and-forth comments, just write a top level review).
(that’s still me musing-out-loud, not like making a final decision, but I will think about it more)
The conflation of “Duncan’s ideal” and “the perfect ideal everyone has agreed to” is what I’m complaining about.
If Duncan had, e.g., included guidelines that were LW consensus but he disagreed with, then it would feel more like an attempt to codify the site’s collective preferences rather than his in particular.
I don’t think that Duncan tried to describe what everyone has agreed to, I think he tried to describe the ideal truth-seeking discussion norms, irrespective of this site’s current discussion norms.
Added: I guess one can see here what the algorithm he aimed to run, which had elements of both:
In other words, the guidelines are descriptive of good discourse that already exists; here I am attempting to convert them into prescriptions, with some wiggle room and some caveats.
I wish this had been called “Duncan’s Guidelines for Discourse” or something like that. I like most of the guidelines given, but they’re not consensus. And while I support Duncan’s right to block people from his posts (and agree with him far on discourse norms far more than with the people he blocked), it means that people who disagree with him on the rules can’t make their case in the comments. That feels like an unbalanced playing field to me.
Also just on priors, consider how unproductive and messy, mostly talking about who said what and analyzing virtues of participants, the conversation caused by this post and its author was. I think even without reading it it’s an indicator of somewhat doubtful origin for a set of prescriptivist guidelines.
I think that Duncan was not aspiring to set his own preferred standards, but to figure out the best standards for truth-seeking discourse. I might agree that he did not perfectly succeed, but I’m not sure this means all attempts, if deemed not perfectly successful, should be called “My Guidelines for My Preferred Discourse”.
I think the point is, anything aspiring to that needs to not have people blocked.
I see. I agree it makes the strength of discourse here weaker, and agree that the people blocked were specifically people who have disagreements about the standards to aspire to in large group discourse. I am grateful that at least one of the people has engaged well elsewhere, and have written a review encouraging people to positively vote on that post (I gave it +4). While I do think it’s likely some valid criticisms of content within the posts have been missed as a result of such silencing effects under Duncan’s posts, I feel confident enough that there’s a lot of valuable content that I still think it deserves to score highly in the review.
Yeah, I’m not making any object level claims about this post one way or another, just thinking about the general principles.
Thinking a bit more:
I think the Review does fairly naturally make a schelling time for people to write up more top-level responses on things they disagree with. I think it’s probably important for it to be possible to write reviews on posts during the Review unless the author specifically removes it from consideration in the Review (which maybe should be special-cased, and doesn’t mean people can write more back-and-forth comments, just write a top level review).
(that’s still me musing-out-loud, not like making a final decision, but I will think about it more)
The conflation of “Duncan’s ideal” and “the perfect ideal everyone has agreed to” is what I’m complaining about.
If Duncan had, e.g., included guidelines that were LW consensus but he disagreed with, then it would feel more like an attempt to codify the site’s collective preferences rather than his in particular.
I don’t think that Duncan tried to describe what everyone has agreed to, I think he tried to describe the ideal truth-seeking discussion norms, irrespective of this site’s current discussion norms.
Added: I guess one can see here what the algorithm he aimed to run, which had elements of both: