Mod notice: just a pre-emptive caution, we think that there’s a bit of a risk involved whenever people ask each other for public feedback on their real-life personas. In particular, there could be failure models of the kind “Kaj asks NewGuy for feedback, is a high-status person so gets a lot of upvotes, NewGuy feels pressured to respond and also hates Kaj’s guts, but in light of the upvotes and Kaj’s general status doesn’t feel comfortable answering honestly, but doesn’t want to answer dishonestly either, gets really uncomfortable”.
Now, Duncan’s comment here doesn’t look like it would produce that kind of a problem (and we don’t think that Duncan did anything wrong in asking). But just to avoid these kinds of problems, we want to publicly establish a policy that anyone who gets asked for feedback on their real-life behavior should feel free to ignore the question and just not respond, no explanation necessary. This policy obviously includes Duncan’s comment to Helen here, so Helen shouldn’t feel any pressure to respond if not totally comfortable with responding.
(This is the first time the mod team has really thought about this situation, so if you have thoughts about how we should deal with things like this [or whether we should intervene at all], feel free to open a post in meta about it with alternative suggestions.)
Thanks, Kaj—I think this is a good thing to be cautious of in general. In this case I’m happy to send Duncan my thoughts, but am planning to do so privately, since I feel like that creates less incentive for other people to be like “ooh, do me!” in the hopes of getting public praise.
(I’m happy to try sending thoughts to anyone I know who wants them, though I think in plenty of cases it’ll just be “I don’t notice anything particularly remarkable about you on this axis”.)
Mod notice: just a pre-emptive caution, we think that there’s a bit of a risk involved whenever people ask each other for public feedback on their real-life personas. In particular, there could be failure models of the kind “Kaj asks NewGuy for feedback, is a high-status person so gets a lot of upvotes, NewGuy feels pressured to respond and also hates Kaj’s guts, but in light of the upvotes and Kaj’s general status doesn’t feel comfortable answering honestly, but doesn’t want to answer dishonestly either, gets really uncomfortable”.
Now, Duncan’s comment here doesn’t look like it would produce that kind of a problem (and we don’t think that Duncan did anything wrong in asking). But just to avoid these kinds of problems, we want to publicly establish a policy that anyone who gets asked for feedback on their real-life behavior should feel free to ignore the question and just not respond, no explanation necessary. This policy obviously includes Duncan’s comment to Helen here, so Helen shouldn’t feel any pressure to respond if not totally comfortable with responding.
(This is the first time the mod team has really thought about this situation, so if you have thoughts about how we should deal with things like this [or whether we should intervene at all], feel free to open a post in meta about it with alternative suggestions.)
Thanks, Kaj—I think this is a good thing to be cautious of in general. In this case I’m happy to send Duncan my thoughts, but am planning to do so privately, since I feel like that creates less incentive for other people to be like “ooh, do me!” in the hopes of getting public praise.
(I’m happy to try sending thoughts to anyone I know who wants them, though I think in plenty of cases it’ll just be “I don’t notice anything particularly remarkable about you on this axis”.)
Loren ipsum