My current best guess [epistemic status: likely to change my mind about this] is something like “politeness norms, that are tailored for epistemic culture.”
The point of politeness norms is to provide a simple API that lets people interact reliably, without having to fully trust each other, and without spending lots of cognitive overhead on each interaction.
Default politeness norms aren’t really optimized for epistemic culture. So nerds (correctly) notice “hmm, if we limit ourselves to default politeness norms we seem epistemically screwed.”
I think it’s important that people be encouraged to write posts (both low and high effort) without stressing too much – as part of a longterm strategy causing them to grow and the site to flourish. It’s also important that people be encouraged to point out errors in the post (without stressing too much), as part of a longterm strategy that includes “make sure the people writing posts get feedback, and grow, as well as correct object-level errors they may have been making so readers don’t come away from the post with misinformation.”
The failure mode is “people writing low effort criticism that turns out to be wrong, or missing the point, etc”. (And sometimes, this being due to fairly deep differences in frame).
I think something like “epistemic status tags for both posts and comments” may help here.
A post might open with “Epistemic status: exploratory, low confidence” which sets the tone for what you should expect from it.
A comment might open with “Didn’t read the post in full, but a quick first impression: This point seems wrong” or “not sure if I quite understood your point, but this seemed incorrect” or something. [Note: not necessarily endorsing those particular phrasings]. The phrasing hedges slightly against the downside of misinterpretation, frame difference, or the critic-being-the-wrong-one.
I think “accidentally suppressing criticism” is a real concern, but it seems like there should be fairly standardizable conversation tools that make it easier to write criticism without as much downside risk.
My current best guess [epistemic status: likely to change my mind about this] is something like “politeness norms, that are tailored for epistemic culture.”
The point of politeness norms is to provide a simple API that lets people interact reliably, without having to fully trust each other, and without spending lots of cognitive overhead on each interaction.
Default politeness norms aren’t really optimized for epistemic culture. So nerds (correctly) notice “hmm, if we limit ourselves to default politeness norms we seem epistemically screwed.”
But the naive response to that causes a bunch of problems a la why our kind can’t cooperate and defecting by accident (hey, look, another post by Lionhearted)
I think it’s important that people be encouraged to write posts (both low and high effort) without stressing too much – as part of a longterm strategy causing them to grow and the site to flourish. It’s also important that people be encouraged to point out errors in the post (without stressing too much), as part of a longterm strategy that includes “make sure the people writing posts get feedback, and grow, as well as correct object-level errors they may have been making so readers don’t come away from the post with misinformation.”
The failure mode is “people writing low effort criticism that turns out to be wrong, or missing the point, etc”. (And sometimes, this being due to fairly deep differences in frame).
I think something like “epistemic status tags for both posts and comments” may help here.
A post might open with “Epistemic status: exploratory, low confidence” which sets the tone for what you should expect from it.
A comment might open with “Didn’t read the post in full, but a quick first impression: This point seems wrong” or “not sure if I quite understood your point, but this seemed incorrect” or something. [Note: not necessarily endorsing those particular phrasings]. The phrasing hedges slightly against the downside of misinterpretation, frame difference, or the critic-being-the-wrong-one.
I think “accidentally suppressing criticism” is a real concern, but it seems like there should be fairly standardizable conversation tools that make it easier to write criticism without as much downside risk.