Huh, I hadn’t originally been thinking in terms of criticism (I thought of it more as a minor factual correction, which, I dunno maybe also counts as criticism, but of a different sort)
Reflecting a bit more though – there’s some context I just realized I’d been acting on implicitly, but which is among the more explicit moderation policies that LW has:
The LW frontpage guidelines say: “present your own perspective, avoid trying to represent group consensus.” This is not an ironclad rule, but it is something you should be hesitant about – in particular because it’s easy to misrepresent what other people think by accident (due to typical mind fallacy etc)
I’d have had a very different response if toon had said “In the first example, I’m reasonably sure that competition increased value. In the second example, I’m reasonably sure that competition decreased value.” (compared to the original, which said “we can be reasonably sure”)
None of this is something I actually had that strong an opinion about (the reason I didn’t put much effort into my initial comment was because this wasn’t actually that important to me, I just wanted to quickly flag that the “we” didn’t speak for everyone, and I think minor factual corrections, and minor norm violations, shouldn’t require much effort to flag).
That said, I’ve updated that (obviously, in retrospect), if I write a quick off-the-cuff comment it’s not obvious to anyone else why it’s short. I’ll at least think a little more about it before posting next time, but probably won’t be radically changing my personal policy.
Huh, I hadn’t originally been thinking in terms of criticism (I thought of it more as a minor factual correction, which, I dunno maybe also counts as criticism, but of a different sort)
Reflecting a bit more though – there’s some context I just realized I’d been acting on implicitly, but which is among the more explicit moderation policies that LW has:
The LW frontpage guidelines say: “present your own perspective, avoid trying to represent group consensus.” This is not an ironclad rule, but it is something you should be hesitant about – in particular because it’s easy to misrepresent what other people think by accident (due to typical mind fallacy etc)
I’d have had a very different response if toon had said “In the first example, I’m reasonably sure that competition increased value. In the second example, I’m reasonably sure that competition decreased value.” (compared to the original, which said “we can be reasonably sure”)
None of this is something I actually had that strong an opinion about (the reason I didn’t put much effort into my initial comment was because this wasn’t actually that important to me, I just wanted to quickly flag that the “we” didn’t speak for everyone, and I think minor factual corrections, and minor norm violations, shouldn’t require much effort to flag).
That said, I’ve updated that (obviously, in retrospect), if I write a quick off-the-cuff comment it’s not obvious to anyone else why it’s short. I’ll at least think a little more about it before posting next time, but probably won’t be radically changing my personal policy.