Lastly, we do recommend that new contributors (posters or commenters) take time to familiarize themselves with the sites norms and culture to maximize the chances that your contributions are well-received.
While we should be polite, we should not have to submit to a culture in order to produce submissions. In other words, aligning with “norms and culture” will normally produce bias. We should not care about how “well-received” something is, rather, we should just be concerned with how right it is : )
The community norms are orthogonal or opposed to figuring out what’s right. In which case it’s unclear why you’d want to engage with this community. Perhaps you altruistically want to improve people’s beliefs, but if so, disregarding the norms and culture is a good way to be ignored (or banned), since the people bought into the culture think they’re important for getting things right, and ignoring them makes your submission less likely to be worth engaging with.
The culture and norms in fact successfully get at things which are important for getting things right, and in disregarding them, you’re actually much less likely to figure out what’s true. People are justified in ignoring and downvoting you if you don’t stick to them.
It’s also possible that there’s more than one set of truth-seeking norms, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to communicate across them. So better to say “over here, we operate in X, if you want to participate, please follow X norms. And I think that’s legit.
Of course, this is very abstract and it’s possible you have examples I’d agree with.
While we should be polite, we should not have to submit to a culture in order to produce submissions. In other words, aligning with “norms and culture” will normally produce bias. We should not care about how “well-received” something is, rather, we should just be concerned with how right it is : )
I think there are two possibilities:
The community norms are orthogonal or opposed to figuring out what’s right. In which case it’s unclear why you’d want to engage with this community. Perhaps you altruistically want to improve people’s beliefs, but if so, disregarding the norms and culture is a good way to be ignored (or banned), since the people bought into the culture think they’re important for getting things right, and ignoring them makes your submission less likely to be worth engaging with.
The culture and norms in fact successfully get at things which are important for getting things right, and in disregarding them, you’re actually much less likely to figure out what’s true. People are justified in ignoring and downvoting you if you don’t stick to them.
It’s also possible that there’s more than one set of truth-seeking norms, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to communicate across them. So better to say “over here, we operate in X, if you want to participate, please follow X norms. And I think that’s legit.
Of course, this is very abstract and it’s possible you have examples I’d agree with.