I think it is somewhat important (it affects incentives for writers to write), but I think it’s a symptom of something very important: namely, that the comment is motivated by a desire to win an argument rather than by a desire to find out what’s true. If you want to win an argument you nitpick the weakest part of a post; if you want to find out what’s true you update on the strongest part.
I think it would be amazing if LW could in fact become a community of people primarily motivated by a desire to find out what’s true (appropriately tempered by a desire to actually do something with all those truths), but it’s unclear how realistic this desire is. Another approach more in line with the kind of stuff Paul’s been thinking about is to think about mechanisms for getting good comments out of people who just want to win arguments.
the comment is motivated by a desire to win an argument rather than by a desire to find out what’s true
Not necessarily. I would expect that sometimes (maybe even often in the LW environment) nitpicking is motivated by the OCD-ish desire for perfection and completeness: you see, say, a valid argument with a small misstep along the way: you would be motivated to correct that misstep so that the entire post is without blemish.
What if authors of the nitpicking comments had an option to label them as “nitpicking”, which would even result in the comment being displayed with smaller font? (And the whole subthread below the “nitpicking” comment would automatically be labeled “nitpicking” by the system.) Maybe that would introduce some extra self-awareness to the debate.
More generally, support many different labels, such as “nitpicking” or “suggestion / new idea” or “expression of gratitude” or whatever… and have them visually represented by e.g. colored frame around the comment. (For example, this comment would be classified as “suggestion”.) In a way that makes it for System 1 easy to recognize it, so as a reader you can decide to e.g. skip all the nitpicking comments, or all the social comments.
Would be nice to have a more general solution in the form of a robust tagging system + ways for a user to filter (or apply colour/flair/decorations) to comments based on tags.
I think it is somewhat important (it affects incentives for writers to write), but I think it’s a symptom of something very important: namely, that the comment is motivated by a desire to win an argument rather than by a desire to find out what’s true. If you want to win an argument you nitpick the weakest part of a post; if you want to find out what’s true you update on the strongest part.
I think it would be amazing if LW could in fact become a community of people primarily motivated by a desire to find out what’s true (appropriately tempered by a desire to actually do something with all those truths), but it’s unclear how realistic this desire is. Another approach more in line with the kind of stuff Paul’s been thinking about is to think about mechanisms for getting good comments out of people who just want to win arguments.
Not necessarily. I would expect that sometimes (maybe even often in the LW environment) nitpicking is motivated by the OCD-ish desire for perfection and completeness: you see, say, a valid argument with a small misstep along the way: you would be motivated to correct that misstep so that the entire post is without blemish.
What if authors of the nitpicking comments had an option to label them as “nitpicking”, which would even result in the comment being displayed with smaller font? (And the whole subthread below the “nitpicking” comment would automatically be labeled “nitpicking” by the system.) Maybe that would introduce some extra self-awareness to the debate.
More generally, support many different labels, such as “nitpicking” or “suggestion / new idea” or “expression of gratitude” or whatever… and have them visually represented by e.g. colored frame around the comment. (For example, this comment would be classified as “suggestion”.) In a way that makes it for System 1 easy to recognize it, so as a reader you can decide to e.g. skip all the nitpicking comments, or all the social comments.
When I nitpick, I sometimes enclose my entire comment in parentheses, and/or explicitly write “nitpick”, as a manual approach to this.
Would be nice to have a more general solution in the form of a robust tagging system + ways for a user to filter (or apply colour/flair/decorations) to comments based on tags.