Vladimir, I really do appreciate corrections. As you’ve seen, I update posts in response to them.
It’s just that if you say 100 negative things to me in a row without saying a single positive thing, I start to get the impression that you think everything I write is bad, and I should stop writing. (If you doubt my impression, scroll through your last 100 comments that were replies to me.)
That’s why I hope to gain an accurate impression of people’s reaction to my work—so I can decide whether to keep writing.
If I get nothing but negative feedback from people or from a particular person, then I have to take guesses as to whether this is because (1) the vocalized feedback presents an accurate picture of their assessment of my work, or whether it’s because (2) their vocalized feedback does not present an accurate impression of their assessment of my work (that is, they generally appreciate my writing), but they decide to only vocalize negative comments and never (or rarely) vocalize positive comments.
(I do in general tend to have more pessimistic beliefs than average, which at least on average happens to be on the right side of the bias. I also don’t hesitate suspecting that people don’t know what they are thinking or doing and why, even if they explicitly describe what they think they think. And I’m more willing than usual to risk offending people to their face, where I believe I can get away with it. So I’ll point out if I think something is wrong, where many people would prefer to change the topic or agree politely, for the flaw might be small and the tradeoff between keeping the flaw intact and being impolite is ruled against the improvement. This could account for much of the difference in impression from my comments and others’ comments.)
It’s just that if you [Nesov] say 100 negative things to me in a row without saying a single positive thing, I start to get the impression that you think everything I write is bad, and I should stop writing.
Would someone write 100 pieces of constructive criticism if they wanted you to stop writing? More likely they would just silently vote you down, or say “please stop writing”.
Besides what Nesov already said, I think a major cause of the frequent nit-picking and misinterpretations is that you’re following the (unfortunate, in my view) LW tradition of writing sequences that hide the overall point/conclusions until the end. I’ve made this complaint before (to someone else, but it’s the same complaint).
In addition to what I said last time about telegraphing conclusions helping to avoid ambiguities, if I don’t know what your overall conclusions are, then I can’t tell which errors in a given post are relevant to your conclusions and therefore should be pointed out, and which can be safely ignored. And given how important this topic is, Nesov might think that it’s safer to err on the side of too much rather than too little nit-picking. Also it’s sometimes unclear which of your posts are meant to be part of your FAI-relevant meta-ethics sequence (as opposed to intended to help LWers improve their human rationality or are just of general interest to LW readers), so Nesov might unnecessarily hold them all to the same high standard intended for FAI-relevant discussion. For example, is your latest post “Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations?” supposed to be part of that sequence?
Since you appear to either agree with particular items of my feedback, or alternatively I recognize my own confusion that led to disagreement, how does that make a bad impression of your work, or argue for stopping to write? I think I just don’t have anything substantial to say on the topics you write about (as often turns out only in retrospect), so I only react to what I read, and where the reaction is positive, it’s usually not useful to express it. As I said recently, I think your contributions are good LW material.
You just don’t cover the topics I care about, and various reasons conspire to make me misinterpret some of your writings as saying something I believe to be wrong, but every time you point out that they shouldn’t be interpreted the way that leads to the disagreement. The disagreement gets dissolved by stipulating more accurate definitions. This makes me suspicious a bit (that the reinterpretations are fake explanations of lack of some of the errors I point out, ways to protect the argument), but I mostly concede, and wait for the connection to normativity you hint at that should make your hidden position (and its relation to preceding material) clearer.
Thanks. This is helpful, and I believe it to be accurate. I do disagree with this part, though:
where the reaction is positive, it’s usually not useful to express it
When I only get negative feedback, and yet my posts are upvoted, I don’t know which parts are connecting with people. I only know which parts of my posts are upsetting to people, and which parts are wrong and need to be fixed.
What kind of protocol do you envision? Detailed review is way too much work in most cases, a single perceived flaw is easy to point out, and parts that seem correct usually both cover most of the essay and are expected to be seen as correct by most readers.
(More detailed feedback could be gathered using a new software tool, I suspect, like voting on sections of the text, and then summarizing the votes over the text with e.g. its color. It would be more realistic than asking for a different social custom for the same reason normal voting works and asking for feedback about overall impression doesn’t.)
I think you are rationalizing. I think you simply want attention and praise and don’t care so much about specific feedback. But I disagree with Vladimir: explicit personal attention and praise, while uninformative, are useful; they are better motivators than karma points.
I am also skeptical of people’s ability to tell you useful things about what they liked in an article. No one is going to tell you that they were convinced by the irrelevant picture of a brain.
Do Mr. Nesov’s comments seem negative in general, not just to you? It is worth checking. How does he normally reply to the type of topics you cover? Maybe (apparently) being from the well known land of pessimism affects his style and you interpret a comment as negative when it is not meant to be so?
FWIW, I always click on your posts, though I rarely have anything to contribute.
...at which point I should restate that I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Nesov’s intelligence, rationality practice, and contributions to this site.
Upvotes indicate that this is a natural nitpick to make that is mostly Vladimir’s-attitude-independent.
Vladimir, I really do appreciate corrections. As you’ve seen, I update posts in response to them.
It’s just that if you say 100 negative things to me in a row without saying a single positive thing, I start to get the impression that you think everything I write is bad, and I should stop writing. (If you doubt my impression, scroll through your last 100 comments that were replies to me.)
That’s why I hope to gain an accurate impression of people’s reaction to my work—so I can decide whether to keep writing.
If I get nothing but negative feedback from people or from a particular person, then I have to take guesses as to whether this is because (1) the vocalized feedback presents an accurate picture of their assessment of my work, or whether it’s because (2) their vocalized feedback does not present an accurate impression of their assessment of my work (that is, they generally appreciate my writing), but they decide to only vocalize negative comments and never (or rarely) vocalize positive comments.
Does that make sense?
(I do in general tend to have more pessimistic beliefs than average, which at least on average happens to be on the right side of the bias. I also don’t hesitate suspecting that people don’t know what they are thinking or doing and why, even if they explicitly describe what they think they think. And I’m more willing than usual to risk offending people to their face, where I believe I can get away with it. So I’ll point out if I think something is wrong, where many people would prefer to change the topic or agree politely, for the flaw might be small and the tradeoff between keeping the flaw intact and being impolite is ruled against the improvement. This could account for much of the difference in impression from my comments and others’ comments.)
Would someone write 100 pieces of constructive criticism if they wanted you to stop writing? More likely they would just silently vote you down, or say “please stop writing”.
Besides what Nesov already said, I think a major cause of the frequent nit-picking and misinterpretations is that you’re following the (unfortunate, in my view) LW tradition of writing sequences that hide the overall point/conclusions until the end. I’ve made this complaint before (to someone else, but it’s the same complaint).
In addition to what I said last time about telegraphing conclusions helping to avoid ambiguities, if I don’t know what your overall conclusions are, then I can’t tell which errors in a given post are relevant to your conclusions and therefore should be pointed out, and which can be safely ignored. And given how important this topic is, Nesov might think that it’s safer to err on the side of too much rather than too little nit-picking. Also it’s sometimes unclear which of your posts are meant to be part of your FAI-relevant meta-ethics sequence (as opposed to intended to help LWers improve their human rationality or are just of general interest to LW readers), so Nesov might unnecessarily hold them all to the same high standard intended for FAI-relevant discussion. For example, is your latest post “Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations?” supposed to be part of that sequence?
Fair enough. I’ll try to make things clearer in some upcoming posts.
‘Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations’ is of course relevant to ethics but it’s not technically part of my metaethics sequence.
Since you appear to either agree with particular items of my feedback, or alternatively I recognize my own confusion that led to disagreement, how does that make a bad impression of your work, or argue for stopping to write? I think I just don’t have anything substantial to say on the topics you write about (as often turns out only in retrospect), so I only react to what I read, and where the reaction is positive, it’s usually not useful to express it. As I said recently, I think your contributions are good LW material.
You just don’t cover the topics I care about, and various reasons conspire to make me misinterpret some of your writings as saying something I believe to be wrong, but every time you point out that they shouldn’t be interpreted the way that leads to the disagreement. The disagreement gets dissolved by stipulating more accurate definitions. This makes me suspicious a bit (that the reinterpretations are fake explanations of lack of some of the errors I point out, ways to protect the argument), but I mostly concede, and wait for the connection to normativity you hint at that should make your hidden position (and its relation to preceding material) clearer.
Thanks. This is helpful, and I believe it to be accurate. I do disagree with this part, though:
When I only get negative feedback, and yet my posts are upvoted, I don’t know which parts are connecting with people. I only know which parts of my posts are upsetting to people, and which parts are wrong and need to be fixed.
What kind of protocol do you envision? Detailed review is way too much work in most cases, a single perceived flaw is easy to point out, and parts that seem correct usually both cover most of the essay and are expected to be seen as correct by most readers.
(More detailed feedback could be gathered using a new software tool, I suspect, like voting on sections of the text, and then summarizing the votes over the text with e.g. its color. It would be more realistic than asking for a different social custom for the same reason normal voting works and asking for feedback about overall impression doesn’t.)
One possible format is:
“I like X and Y. More like that, please. But I think B isn’t quite right, because Z.”
This could actually work… Fighting abundance of choice with sampling. I would modify it this way:
When making a correction or complaint as a top-level comment, choose one positive thing about the post, if any, and point it out first.
So this is a more informative form of “IAWYC, but...”
Exactly!
I think you are rationalizing. I think you simply want attention and praise and don’t care so much about specific feedback. But I disagree with Vladimir: explicit personal attention and praise, while uninformative, are useful; they are better motivators than karma points.
I am also skeptical of people’s ability to tell you useful things about what they liked in an article. No one is going to tell you that they were convinced by the irrelevant picture of a brain.
You may need to check your priors.
Do Mr. Nesov’s comments seem negative in general, not just to you? It is worth checking. How does he normally reply to the type of topics you cover? Maybe (apparently) being from the well known land of pessimism affects his style and you interpret a comment as negative when it is not meant to be so?
FWIW, I always click on your posts, though I rarely have anything to contribute.
Yes, though not always.
...at which point I should restate that I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Nesov’s intelligence, rationality practice, and contributions to this site.