I also want to note what I think is the biggest, most obvious mistake I made here. When I wrote the initial comment criticizing Benquo, I went through several drafts. Some of them focused more on specific examples of why I thought the comment was unacceptable and where it crossed the line. Other drafts focused on an overall lack-of-charity, in a discussion where charity was crucial.
Those drafts felt long/meandering/hard-to-parse, and after a couple hours I said “gah, fuck it, ship it”, and then while in fuck-it-ship-it mode, deleted a couple paragraphs in an attempt for brevity. In the process, I gutted the actual core point, leaving a pretty superficial criticism about “don’t literally invoke Nazism please.”
I think this was the point where making slightly different choices with a clearer head could have had a huge impact on the overall frame of the conversation.
Then I didn’t really re-examine the comment until a few days later. And at that point, it had seemed to me that it made more sense to wait till I’d talked to Ben, and then write a more thorough comment that fully addressed everything. I still wasn’t modeling costs to Duncan, and didn’t fully understand that until the point where Duncan called them out explicitly.
I also want to note what I think is the biggest, most obvious mistake I made here. When I wrote the initial comment criticizing Benquo, I went through several drafts. Some of them focused more on specific examples of why I thought the comment was unacceptable and where it crossed the line. Other drafts focused on an overall lack-of-charity, in a discussion where charity was crucial.
Those drafts felt long/meandering/hard-to-parse, and after a couple hours I said “gah, fuck it, ship it”, and then while in fuck-it-ship-it mode, deleted a couple paragraphs in an attempt for brevity. In the process, I gutted the actual core point, leaving a pretty superficial criticism about “don’t literally invoke Nazism please.”
I think this was the point where making slightly different choices with a clearer head could have had a huge impact on the overall frame of the conversation.
Then I didn’t really re-examine the comment until a few days later. And at that point, it had seemed to me that it made more sense to wait till I’d talked to Ben, and then write a more thorough comment that fully addressed everything. I still wasn’t modeling costs to Duncan, and didn’t fully understand that until the point where Duncan called them out explicitly.