saddened (but unsurprised) to see few others decrying the obvious strawmen
In general, the “market” for criticism just doesn’t seem very efficient at all! You might have hoped that people would mostly agree about what constitutes a flaw, critics would compete to find flaws in order to win status, and authors would learn not to write posts with flaws in them (in order to not lose status to the critics competing to point out flaws).
I wonder which part of the criticism market is failing: is it more that people don’t agree about what constitutes a flaw, or that authors don’t have enough of an incentive to care, or something else? We seem to end up with a lot of critics who specialize in detecting a specific kind of flaw (“needs examples” guy, “reward is not the optimization target” guy, “categories aren’t arbitrary” guy, &c.), with very limited reaction from authors or imitation by other potential critics.
My quick guess is that people don’t agree about what constitutes a (relevant) flaw. (And there are lots of irrelevant flaws so you can’t just check for the existence of any flaws at all).
I think if people could agree, the authorial incentives would follow. I’m fairly sympathetic to the idea that readers aren’t incentivised to correctly agree on what consitutes a flaw.
In general, the “market” for criticism just doesn’t seem very efficient at all! You might have hoped that people would mostly agree about what constitutes a flaw, critics would compete to find flaws in order to win status, and authors would learn not to write posts with flaws in them (in order to not lose status to the critics competing to point out flaws).
I wonder which part of the criticism market is failing: is it more that people don’t agree about what constitutes a flaw, or that authors don’t have enough of an incentive to care, or something else? We seem to end up with a lot of critics who specialize in detecting a specific kind of flaw (“needs examples” guy, “reward is not the optimization target” guy, “categories aren’t arbitrary” guy, &c.), with very limited reaction from authors or imitation by other potential critics.
My quick guess is that people don’t agree about what constitutes a (relevant) flaw. (And there are lots of irrelevant flaws so you can’t just check for the existence of any flaws at all).
I think if people could agree, the authorial incentives would follow. I’m fairly sympathetic to the idea that readers aren’t incentivised to correctly agree on what consitutes a flaw.