In in-person discussions, a good way to lessen this problem is to preface statements with qualifiers like “This is a dumb question, but...” or “Here’s a crazy idea:” or “I don’t endorse this, but I was thinking...” and so on. This creates a kind of protection for the speaker. They still get credit for good ideas; but if the idea really was bad, they take less of a hit.
This doesn’t work as well for longform text discussions, because readers know you had time to think things through. But [epistemic status:] flags can play a similar role. If you don’t feel like an idea is good enough, you preface it with [epistemic status: super dumb] or whatever, and take some comfort in the fact that if the reader doesn’t like what you wrote, they were warned.
I think having this norm is much better than attempting to sustain a norm that everything is “epistemic status: raw thoughts” by default.
I mostly agree with this angle, my mind is definitely changed. This disagreement reminds me of the culture war between “take personal responsibility even though society sucks” and “society is to blame for putting us in shitty situations.”
My main point here is that improving babble doesn’t mean reducing prune. Alkjash sometimes speaks as if it’s just a matter of opening the floodgates. Sometimes people do need to just relax, turn off their prune, and open the floodgates. But if you try to do this in general, you might have initial success but then experience backlash, since you may have failed to address the underlying reasons why you had closed the gates to begin with.
I do agree with this in general, although at that time of writing I think my prune was particularly pathological, and simply opening the floodgates led to uniformly positive outcomes. Independently, one thing I tried to emphasize is that improving babble is often about trying on different prune, hence the anecdotes about poetry and weirdly constrained writing.
I mostly agree with this angle, my mind is definitely changed. This disagreement reminds me of the culture war between “take personal responsibility even though society sucks” and “society is to blame for putting us in shitty situations.”
I do agree with this in general, although at that time of writing I think my prune was particularly pathological, and simply opening the floodgates led to uniformly positive outcomes. Independently, one thing I tried to emphasize is that improving babble is often about trying on different prune, hence the anecdotes about poetry and weirdly constrained writing.
[epistemic status: raw thoughts]