If a post has 39 “short comments saying “I want to see more posts like this post.”″ and 153 nitpicks, that says something about the community reaction. This is especially relevant since “but this detail is wrong” seems to be a common reaction to these kinds of issues on geek fora.
(Yes, not nearly all posts are nitpicks, and my meta-complaining doesn’t contribute all that much signal either.)
This is especially relevant since “but this detail is wrong” seems to be a common reaction to these kinds of issues on geek fora.
It feels to me like we both have an empirical disagreement about whether or not this behavior is amplified when discussing “these kind of issues” and a normative disagreement about whether this behavior is constructive or destructive.
For any post, one should expect the number of corrections to be related to the number of things that need to be corrected, modulated by how interesting the post is. A post which three people read is likely to not get any corrections; a post which hundreds of people read is likely to get almost all of its errors noticed and flagged. Discussions about privilege tend to have wide interest, but as a category I haven’t noticed them being significantly better than other posts, and so I would expect them to receive more corrections than posts of similar quality, because they’re wider interest. It could be the case that the posts make people more defensive and thus more critical, but it’s not clear to me that hypothesis is necessary.
In general, corrections seem constructive to me; it both improves the quality of the post and helps bring the author and audience closer together. It can come across as hostile, and it’s often worth putting extra effort into critical comments to make them friendlier and more precise, but I’m curious to hear if you feel differently and if so, why you have that impression.
All of what you say is true; it is also true that I’m somewhat thin-skinned on this point due to negative experiences on non-LW fora; but I also think that there is a real effect. It is true that the comments on this post are not significantly more critical/nitpicky than the comments on How minimal is our intelligence. However, the comments here do seem to pick far more nits than, say, the comments on How to have things correctly.
The first post is heavily fact-based and defends a thesis based on—of necessity—incomplete data and back-projection of mechanisms that are not fully understood. I don’t mean to say that it is a bad post; but there are certainly plenty of legitimate alternative viewpoints and footnotes that could be added, and it is no surprise that there are a lot of both in the comments section.
The second post is an idiosyncratic, personal narrative; it is intended to speak a wider truth, but it’s clearly one person’s very personal view. It, too, is not a bad post; but it’s not a terribly fact-based one, and the comments find fewer nits to pick.
This post seems closer to the second post—personal narratives—but the comment section more closely resembles that of the first post.
As to the desirability of this effect: it’s good to be a bit more careful around whatever minorities you have on the site, and this goes double for when the minority is trying to express a personal narrative. I do believe there are some nits that could be picked in this post, but I’m less convinced that the cumulative improvement to the post is worth the cumulative… well, not quite invalidation, but the comments section does bother me, at least.
If a post has 39 “short comments saying “I want to see more posts like this post.”″ and 153 nitpicks, that says something about the community reaction. This is especially relevant since “but this detail is wrong” seems to be a common reaction to these kinds of issues on geek fora.
(Yes, not nearly all posts are nitpicks, and my meta-complaining doesn’t contribute all that much signal either.)
See “Support That Sounds Like Dissent”.
It feels to me like we both have an empirical disagreement about whether or not this behavior is amplified when discussing “these kind of issues” and a normative disagreement about whether this behavior is constructive or destructive.
For any post, one should expect the number of corrections to be related to the number of things that need to be corrected, modulated by how interesting the post is. A post which three people read is likely to not get any corrections; a post which hundreds of people read is likely to get almost all of its errors noticed and flagged. Discussions about privilege tend to have wide interest, but as a category I haven’t noticed them being significantly better than other posts, and so I would expect them to receive more corrections than posts of similar quality, because they’re wider interest. It could be the case that the posts make people more defensive and thus more critical, but it’s not clear to me that hypothesis is necessary.
In general, corrections seem constructive to me; it both improves the quality of the post and helps bring the author and audience closer together. It can come across as hostile, and it’s often worth putting extra effort into critical comments to make them friendlier and more precise, but I’m curious to hear if you feel differently and if so, why you have that impression.
All of what you say is true; it is also true that I’m somewhat thin-skinned on this point due to negative experiences on non-LW fora; but I also think that there is a real effect. It is true that the comments on this post are not significantly more critical/nitpicky than the comments on How minimal is our intelligence. However, the comments here do seem to pick far more nits than, say, the comments on How to have things correctly.
The first post is heavily fact-based and defends a thesis based on—of necessity—incomplete data and back-projection of mechanisms that are not fully understood. I don’t mean to say that it is a bad post; but there are certainly plenty of legitimate alternative viewpoints and footnotes that could be added, and it is no surprise that there are a lot of both in the comments section.
The second post is an idiosyncratic, personal narrative; it is intended to speak a wider truth, but it’s clearly one person’s very personal view. It, too, is not a bad post; but it’s not a terribly fact-based one, and the comments find fewer nits to pick.
This post seems closer to the second post—personal narratives—but the comment section more closely resembles that of the first post.
As to the desirability of this effect: it’s good to be a bit more careful around whatever minorities you have on the site, and this goes double for when the minority is trying to express a personal narrative. I do believe there are some nits that could be picked in this post, but I’m less convinced that the cumulative improvement to the post is worth the cumulative… well, not quite invalidation, but the comments section does bother me, at least.