I don’t think Qiaochu’s comment is particularly low effort. He has been Berkeley for a long time and spoke about his experiences. Given that he shared his google doc with some people, the comment was probably constructive on net. Though I don’t think it was constructive to the conversation on lesswrong.
If someone posts a detailed thread describing how they want to do X, maybe people should hold off on posting ‘actually trying to do X is a bad idea’. Sometimes the negative comments are right. But lesswrong seems to have gone way too far in the direction of naysaying. As you point out, the top comments are often negative on even high effort posts by highly regarded community members. This is a big problem.
I don’t think Qiaochu’s comment is particularly low effort. He has been Berkeley for a long time and spoke about his experiences. Given that he shared his google doc with some people, the comment was probably constructive on net. Though I don’t think it was constructive to the conversation on lesswrong.
If someone posts a detailed thread describing how they want to do X, maybe people should hold off on posting ‘actually trying to do X is a bad idea’. Sometimes the negative comments are right. But lesswrong seems to have gone way too far in the direction of naysaying. As you point out, the top comments are often negative on even high effort posts by highly regarded community members. This is a big problem.