I’ve downvoted this, because I think it is creating a very dangerous pressure on people stating their opinions openly in this community.
As someone who has been active in EA and rationality community building for a few years now, I have repeatedly experienced the pressure of people demanding explanations of me and the people working with me, so much that at peak times around EA Global responding to those demands took up more than 70% of my time. In retrospect, responding to each argument and comment individually was a bad use of my time, and everyone would have been better served by me taking a step back, and not responding to each comment in particular. And then to instead keep a tally of what confusions or misunderstandings people frequently seemed to have, and eventually write up a more educational post that had some real effort put into it, that tried to explain my perspective on a deeper level.
I see Eliezer mostly doing exactly that, and want him to continue doing that. I don’t think it’s a good use of his time to respond to every comment, especially if he has good reason to expect that it will cost him significant willpower to do so.
Even more so, people demanding explanations or demanding engagement has in my experience reliably lead to exhausting conversations full of defensiveness and hedging, and so I expect comments like this to significantly reduce the probability that people whose time is valuable will engage with the comments on this site.
As someone with time that is relatively valueless compared to Elizer’s and Oliver’s, I’d like to second this comment. As much as I’d love to respond to every person who has a criticism of me, it would take up a lot of mental energy that I’d rather use for writing. That doesn’t mean that I don’t read criticisms and take them to heart.
For me, writing for one specific person, who is almost guaranteed to read what I wrote, is also stimulating. When writing an article, I often feel like talking to an empty room. As a result, I don’t write many articles.
Still, writing articles would probably be a better use of my time, because I often find myself repeating the same things in different 1:1 interactions. (Or perhaps to collect old comments on the same topic, and rewrite them as an article afterwards.) I just haven’t found a way to align my emotions with this.
I guess I wanted to say that “articles > comments” regardless of one’s emotions (assuming one can write good articles). Unless the comment can be made short, or responds to something new. But “new” is impossible to judge from outside; we don’t know what kinds of questions Eliezer gets repeatedly e.g. outside LW.
I’ve downvoted this, because I think it is creating a very dangerous pressure on people stating their opinions openly in this community.
As someone who has been active in EA and rationality community building for a few years now, I have repeatedly experienced the pressure of people demanding explanations of me and the people working with me, so much that at peak times around EA Global responding to those demands took up more than 70% of my time. In retrospect, responding to each argument and comment individually was a bad use of my time, and everyone would have been better served by me taking a step back, and not responding to each comment in particular. And then to instead keep a tally of what confusions or misunderstandings people frequently seemed to have, and eventually write up a more educational post that had some real effort put into it, that tried to explain my perspective on a deeper level.
I see Eliezer mostly doing exactly that, and want him to continue doing that. I don’t think it’s a good use of his time to respond to every comment, especially if he has good reason to expect that it will cost him significant willpower to do so.
Even more so, people demanding explanations or demanding engagement has in my experience reliably lead to exhausting conversations full of defensiveness and hedging, and so I expect comments like this to significantly reduce the probability that people whose time is valuable will engage with the comments on this site.
As someone with time that is relatively valueless compared to Elizer’s and Oliver’s, I’d like to second this comment. As much as I’d love to respond to every person who has a criticism of me, it would take up a lot of mental energy that I’d rather use for writing. That doesn’t mean that I don’t read criticisms and take them to heart.
That’s fair. I find it stimulating to engage with people, so this isn’t really something I empathize with.
For me, writing for one specific person, who is almost guaranteed to read what I wrote, is also stimulating. When writing an article, I often feel like talking to an empty room. As a result, I don’t write many articles.
Still, writing articles would probably be a better use of my time, because I often find myself repeating the same things in different 1:1 interactions. (Or perhaps to collect old comments on the same topic, and rewrite them as an article afterwards.) I just haven’t found a way to align my emotions with this.
I guess I wanted to say that “articles > comments” regardless of one’s emotions (assuming one can write good articles). Unless the comment can be made short, or responds to something new. But “new” is impossible to judge from outside; we don’t know what kinds of questions Eliezer gets repeatedly e.g. outside LW.