Meta: any discussion or reaction you observe to abrasiveness and communication style (including the discussion here) is selected for people who are particularly sensitive to and / or feel strongly enough about these things one way or the other to speak up. I think if you don’t account for this, you’ll end up substantially overestimating the impact and EV in either direction.
To be clear, I think this selection effect is not simply, “lots of people like to talk about Eliezer”, which you tried to head off as best you could. If you made a completely generic post about discourse norms, strategic communication, the effects and (un)desirability of abrasiveness and snark, when and how much it is appropriate, etc. it might get less overall attention. But my guess is that it would still attract the usual suspects and object-level viewpoints, in a way that warps the discussion due to selection.
As a concrete example of the kind of effect this selection might have: I find the norms of discourse on the EA Forum somewhat off-putting, and in general I find that thinking strategically about communication (as opposed to simply communicating) feels somewhat icky and not particularly appealing as a conversational subject. From this, you can probably infer how I feel about some of Eliezer’s comments and the responses. But I also don’t usually feel strongly enough about it to remark on these things either way. I suspect I am not atypical, but that my views are underrepresented in discussions like this.
Meta: any discussion or reaction you observe to abrasiveness and communication style (including the discussion here) is selected for people who are particularly sensitive to and / or feel strongly enough about these things one way or the other to speak up. I think if you don’t account for this, you’ll end up substantially overestimating the impact and EV in either direction.
To be clear, I think this selection effect is not simply, “lots of people like to talk about Eliezer”, which you tried to head off as best you could. If you made a completely generic post about discourse norms, strategic communication, the effects and (un)desirability of abrasiveness and snark, when and how much it is appropriate, etc. it might get less overall attention. But my guess is that it would still attract the usual suspects and object-level viewpoints, in a way that warps the discussion due to selection.
As a concrete example of the kind of effect this selection might have: I find the norms of discourse on the EA Forum somewhat off-putting, and in general I find that thinking strategically about communication (as opposed to simply communicating) feels somewhat icky and not particularly appealing as a conversational subject. From this, you can probably infer how I feel about some of Eliezer’s comments and the responses. But I also don’t usually feel strongly enough about it to remark on these things either way. I suspect I am not atypical, but that my views are underrepresented in discussions like this.