As a personal favor to me, only cite sources you actually believe in.
ever since i read your post on epistemic legibility i find myself thinking about this whenever i’m about to link a source. its resulted in me relying on citing sources much less frequently, and (i think) made my writing clearer and easier to follow.
i think this is a lovely post, and i hope the other points you’ve brought up in it will stick with me just as strongly as that has. especially the suggestion to do more to push back against posts that have substantial flaws… it really is so easy to skip over a flawed post without comment, and i don’t like how often i do it.
i feel like the best thing i could focus on to improve with regards to this is trying to let go of what seems like a kind of maladaptive perfectionism. i’ll often feel an impulse to write out a response that fully lays out whatever flaws i see, attempts to address the implications those flaws have on the rest of the post and the conclusions that it draws, all while anticipating and answering responses people are likely to have. that might be worth doing sometimes… but its not realistic as a typical way of addressing this kind of thing. getting more comfortable with lower effort responses to flaws in what people are saying feels like it should have high +ev.
ever since i read your post on epistemic legibility i find myself thinking about this whenever i’m about to link a source. its resulted in me relying on citing sources much less frequently, and (i think) made my writing clearer and easier to follow.
i think this is a lovely post, and i hope the other points you’ve brought up in it will stick with me just as strongly as that has. especially the suggestion to do more to push back against posts that have substantial flaws… it really is so easy to skip over a flawed post without comment, and i don’t like how often i do it.
i feel like the best thing i could focus on to improve with regards to this is trying to let go of what seems like a kind of maladaptive perfectionism. i’ll often feel an impulse to write out a response that fully lays out whatever flaws i see, attempts to address the implications those flaws have on the rest of the post and the conclusions that it draws, all while anticipating and answering responses people are likely to have. that might be worth doing sometimes… but its not realistic as a typical way of addressing this kind of thing. getting more comfortable with lower effort responses to flaws in what people are saying feels like it should have high +ev.