I quite strongly disagree. This will inevitably lead the most competent and busy people to not share their assessments of anything, since they will be met with the expectation of having to justify every assessment in detail, which is simply not workable in terms of time. It also means there is no way for someone to register that they have a bad feeling about something without being able to make it fully explicit. This also runs into problems with secret information, embarrassing information and situations where someone does not feel safe with the current norms of public discourse.
I recognize and agree with the failure modes of default discourse that this is trying to fix, but I don’t think this norm as described is a good idea.
This will inevitably lead the most competent and busy people to not share their assessments of anything, since they will be met with the expectation of having to justify every assessment in detail, which is simply not workable in terms of time.
See some of the nuance Davis gives in other comment threads on this post that I think address your concerns, but I think this is on net beneficial if we also cause them to not share their assessment either way without explanation. Just because someone is competent or busy doesn’t make their assessments that much more useful unless they actually take the time to make a thoughtful assessment, and I expect the amount their gut reactions to things will be not much better than anyone else’s, caveat being there is probably some appropriate discount function on which their gut assessments are marginally more useful but the discount rate is so high we might as well just ignore it. Put another way, being competent, busy, or an expert doesn’t make you less likely to do the things humans tend to do that lead to low-value judgements (cf. literally everything written about decision under uncertainty in humans) outside of limited contexts with training and rapid feedback, so in most places at most times having this norm is useful.
I’ll also point out this already is the norm in in-person conversation where the only way to express pleasure/displeasure with someone or what they are saying is to do so in a way that opens you up to being asked for justification and failure to provide justification can result in dramatic discounting of your position. Or so the norm seems to be to me.
I don’t think you have to explain everything in excruciating detail, but I think if you’re willing to attack someone you need to be willing to justify that attack if called on it. That does mean that someone might not get to share some criticisms, but in general I think the costs of losing some casual criticism is worth the benefits of improving the discourse overall.
I think registering a bad feeling about something is fine and doesn’t need to have a bunch of time spent on it, as the level of justification needed for something like that is pretty low. I don’t really even consider that an “accusation” per se, but I suppose you could conceptualize it as on a spectrum, where on one side you have “I don’t really like this” and on the other you have extreme stuff like “allowing this is a moral atrocity and the creator is a war criminal”. The latter obviously needs quite a lot of justification, while the former doesn’t much.
I quite strongly disagree. This will inevitably lead the most competent and busy people to not share their assessments of anything, since they will be met with the expectation of having to justify every assessment in detail, which is simply not workable in terms of time. It also means there is no way for someone to register that they have a bad feeling about something without being able to make it fully explicit. This also runs into problems with secret information, embarrassing information and situations where someone does not feel safe with the current norms of public discourse.
I recognize and agree with the failure modes of default discourse that this is trying to fix, but I don’t think this norm as described is a good idea.
See some of the nuance Davis gives in other comment threads on this post that I think address your concerns, but I think this is on net beneficial if we also cause them to not share their assessment either way without explanation. Just because someone is competent or busy doesn’t make their assessments that much more useful unless they actually take the time to make a thoughtful assessment, and I expect the amount their gut reactions to things will be not much better than anyone else’s, caveat being there is probably some appropriate discount function on which their gut assessments are marginally more useful but the discount rate is so high we might as well just ignore it. Put another way, being competent, busy, or an expert doesn’t make you less likely to do the things humans tend to do that lead to low-value judgements (cf. literally everything written about decision under uncertainty in humans) outside of limited contexts with training and rapid feedback, so in most places at most times having this norm is useful.
I’ll also point out this already is the norm in in-person conversation where the only way to express pleasure/displeasure with someone or what they are saying is to do so in a way that opens you up to being asked for justification and failure to provide justification can result in dramatic discounting of your position. Or so the norm seems to be to me.
I don’t think you have to explain everything in excruciating detail, but I think if you’re willing to attack someone you need to be willing to justify that attack if called on it. That does mean that someone might not get to share some criticisms, but in general I think the costs of losing some casual criticism is worth the benefits of improving the discourse overall.
I think registering a bad feeling about something is fine and doesn’t need to have a bunch of time spent on it, as the level of justification needed for something like that is pretty low. I don’t really even consider that an “accusation” per se, but I suppose you could conceptualize it as on a spectrum, where on one side you have “I don’t really like this” and on the other you have extreme stuff like “allowing this is a moral atrocity and the creator is a war criminal”. The latter obviously needs quite a lot of justification, while the former doesn’t much.
What constitutes an attack?