For in-person conversations (I know this was meant as a norm for public discourse): Personally I tend to have a hard time digging into my memories for “data points” when I have a negative or positive impression of some person. It’s kind of the same thing with people asking you “What have you been working on the past week?” – I basically never remember anything immediately (even though I do work on stuff). This creates asymmetric incentives where it’s easier to make negative judgments seem unjustified or at least costly to bring up, which can contribute to a culture where justified critical opinions almost never reach enough of a consensus to change something. I definitely think there should be norms similar to the one described in the post, but I also think that there are situations (e.g., if a person has a reliable track record or if they promise to write a paragraph with some bullet points later on once they had time to introspect) were the norm should be less strict than “back the judgment up immediately or retract it.” And okay, probably one can manage to say a few words even on the spot because introspection is not that slow and opaque, but my point is simply that “This sounds unconvincing” is just as cheap a thing to say as cheap criticism, and the balance should be somewhere in between. So maybe instead of “justify” the norm should say something like “gesture at the type of reasons,” and that should be the bare minimum and more transparency is often preferable. (Another point is that introspecting on intuitive judgments helps refine them, so that’s something that people should do occasionally even if they aren’t being put on the spot to back something up.)
Needless to say, lax norms around this can be terrible in social environments where some people tend to talk too negatively about others and where the charitable voices are less frequent, so I think it’s one of those things where the same type of advice can sometimes be really good, and other times can be absolutely terrible.
For in-person conversations (I know this was meant as a norm for public discourse): Personally I tend to have a hard time digging into my memories for “data points” when I have a negative or positive impression of some person. It’s kind of the same thing with people asking you “What have you been working on the past week?” – I basically never remember anything immediately (even though I do work on stuff). This creates asymmetric incentives where it’s easier to make negative judgments seem unjustified or at least costly to bring up, which can contribute to a culture where justified critical opinions almost never reach enough of a consensus to change something. I definitely think there should be norms similar to the one described in the post, but I also think that there are situations (e.g., if a person has a reliable track record or if they promise to write a paragraph with some bullet points later on once they had time to introspect) were the norm should be less strict than “back the judgment up immediately or retract it.” And okay, probably one can manage to say a few words even on the spot because introspection is not that slow and opaque, but my point is simply that “This sounds unconvincing” is just as cheap a thing to say as cheap criticism, and the balance should be somewhere in between. So maybe instead of “justify” the norm should say something like “gesture at the type of reasons,” and that should be the bare minimum and more transparency is often preferable. (Another point is that introspecting on intuitive judgments helps refine them, so that’s something that people should do occasionally even if they aren’t being put on the spot to back something up.)
Needless to say, lax norms around this can be terrible in social environments where some people tend to talk too negatively about others and where the charitable voices are less frequent, so I think it’s one of those things where the same type of advice can sometimes be really good, and other times can be absolutely terrible.