I actually completely agree that being able to express criticism freely is valuable, I just think there are many non-censorious approaches to niceness we can use.
For example, if the top 20 posters (by recent post karma) decided to all be nicer, I’d expect that that would shift community norms towards niceness looking high-status and consequently the whole community trying to be nicer as a result. Alternatively, adding something like “Please consider [above poster’s name] feelings before hitting ‘Comment’!” above the comment field would probably increase niceness (not that I recommend this specifically, since it would sound overly silly, but maybe a similar injunction to “imagine yourself as having their point of view” appearing 1 time in 5 could be viable). I’m sure there are other options as well that would promote niceness without feeling particularly restrictive or censorious.
(Hopefully I’m interpreting your objections correctly!)
Sure, it’s possible to encourage niceness without deleting anything that wouldn’t be deleted in a less nice regime, but I don’t think censorship was my true objection—or at least my only serious objection—in either of the cases I mentioned.
Thing is, nice is costly. “Don’t be a jerk” is a fairly low bar to clear, but if you have expectations beyond that—if you’re actually treating apparent agreeableness as a terminal value w.r.t. post quality, to put it in LW-speak -- then that implies putting effort into optimizing for it. Which then implies less effort going into optimizing for insight or clarity, since most of us don’t have an unlimited amount of effort budgeted for composing LW posts. To make matters worse, niceness in Anglophone culture generally implies indirection: avoiding direct reference to potentially sensitive points, and working around that with a variety of more or less standardized circumlocutions. Which of course directly reduces clarity. It might be another story if English had a richer formal register, but it doesn’t.
I recognize that others might have more unpleasant emotional responses to direct language than I, and I further recognize that that links into a variety of heuristics which affect exactly the same clarity considerations I’ve been talking about. But, and speaking only for myself here, I’d rather run the risk of occasionally being chafed if it means I have a better chance of integrating what’s being said.
I actually completely agree that being able to express criticism freely is valuable, I just think there are many non-censorious approaches to niceness we can use.
For example, if the top 20 posters (by recent post karma) decided to all be nicer, I’d expect that that would shift community norms towards niceness looking high-status and consequently the whole community trying to be nicer as a result. Alternatively, adding something like “Please consider [above poster’s name] feelings before hitting ‘Comment’!” above the comment field would probably increase niceness (not that I recommend this specifically, since it would sound overly silly, but maybe a similar injunction to “imagine yourself as having their point of view” appearing 1 time in 5 could be viable). I’m sure there are other options as well that would promote niceness without feeling particularly restrictive or censorious.
(Hopefully I’m interpreting your objections correctly!)
Sure, it’s possible to encourage niceness without deleting anything that wouldn’t be deleted in a less nice regime, but I don’t think censorship was my true objection—or at least my only serious objection—in either of the cases I mentioned.
Thing is, nice is costly. “Don’t be a jerk” is a fairly low bar to clear, but if you have expectations beyond that—if you’re actually treating apparent agreeableness as a terminal value w.r.t. post quality, to put it in LW-speak -- then that implies putting effort into optimizing for it. Which then implies less effort going into optimizing for insight or clarity, since most of us don’t have an unlimited amount of effort budgeted for composing LW posts. To make matters worse, niceness in Anglophone culture generally implies indirection: avoiding direct reference to potentially sensitive points, and working around that with a variety of more or less standardized circumlocutions. Which of course directly reduces clarity. It might be another story if English had a richer formal register, but it doesn’t.
I recognize that others might have more unpleasant emotional responses to direct language than I, and I further recognize that that links into a variety of heuristics which affect exactly the same clarity considerations I’ve been talking about. But, and speaking only for myself here, I’d rather run the risk of occasionally being chafed if it means I have a better chance of integrating what’s being said.