I don’t think that if you don’t respond to a comment arguing with you, people will think you’ve lost the argument. I wouldn’t think like that. I would just evaluate your argument on my own and I would evaluate the counterargument in the comment on my own. I don’t bother to respond to comments very often and I haven’t seen anything bad come out of it.
I would just evaluate your argument on my own and I would evaluate the counterargument in the comment on my own.
The precise issue is that a sizable fraction of the audience will predictably not do this, or will do it lazily or incorrectly.
On LessWrong, this shows up in voting patterns, for example, a controversial post will sometimes get some initial upvotes and then the karma / trend will swing around based on the comments and who had the last word. Or, a long back-and-forth ends up getting far fewer votes (and presumably, eyeballs) than the top-level post / comment.
My impression is that most authors aren’t that sensitive to karma per se but they are sensitive to a mental model of the audience that this swinging implies, namely that many onlookers are letting the author and their interlocutor(s) do their thinking for them, with varying levels of attention span, and where “highly upvoted” is often a proxy for “onlookers believe this is worth responding to (but won’t necessarily read the response)”. So responding often feels both high stakes and unrewarding for someone who cares about communicating something to their audience as a whole.
Anyway, I like Duncan’s post as a way of making the point about effort / implied obligation to both onlookers and interlocutors, but something else that might help is some kind of guide / reminder / explanation about principles of being a good / high-effort onlooker.
There are norms that dislike when people don’t respond to criticism. If you are not a carrier, there’s that, it won’t bother you personally[1], but there are others who will be affected. If you ignore a norm, it fades away or fights back. So it’s important to distinguish the positive claim from the normative claim, whether the norm asking people to respond to criticism is a good one to have around, not just whether it’s a real norm with some influence.
The norm of responding to criticism causes problems, despite the obvious arguments in support of it. Its presence makes authors uncomfortable, anticipating the obligation to respond, which creates incentives to prevent ambiguously useless criticism or for such critics to politely self-censor, and so other readers or the author miss out on the criticism that turns out to be on-point.
If on balance the norm seems currently too powerful, then all else equal it’s useful to intentionally ignore it, even as you know that it’s there in some people’s minds. When it fights back, it can make the carriers uncomfortable and annoyed, or visit punishment upon the disobedient, so all else is not equal. But perhaps it’s unjust of it to make its blackmail-like demands, even as the carriers are arguably not centrally personally responsible for the demands or even the consequences of delivering the punishment. And so even with the negative side effects of ignoring the norm there are some sort of arguments for doing that anyway.
Unless you are the author, because you’ll still experience disapproval from the carriers of the norm in the audience if you fail to obey its expectations about your behavior, even if you are not yourself a carrier.
I don’t think that if you don’t respond to a comment arguing with you, people will think you’ve lost the argument. I wouldn’t think like that. I would just evaluate your argument on my own and I would evaluate the counterargument in the comment on my own. I don’t bother to respond to comments very often and I haven’t seen anything bad come out of it.
The precise issue is that a sizable fraction of the audience will predictably not do this, or will do it lazily or incorrectly.
On LessWrong, this shows up in voting patterns, for example, a controversial post will sometimes get some initial upvotes and then the karma / trend will swing around based on the comments and who had the last word. Or, a long back-and-forth ends up getting far fewer votes (and presumably, eyeballs) than the top-level post / comment.
My impression is that most authors aren’t that sensitive to karma per se but they are sensitive to a mental model of the audience that this swinging implies, namely that many onlookers are letting the author and their interlocutor(s) do their thinking for them, with varying levels of attention span, and where “highly upvoted” is often a proxy for “onlookers believe this is worth responding to (but won’t necessarily read the response)”. So responding often feels both high stakes and unrewarding for someone who cares about communicating something to their audience as a whole.
Anyway, I like Duncan’s post as a way of making the point about effort / implied obligation to both onlookers and interlocutors, but something else that might help is some kind of guide / reminder / explanation about principles of being a good / high-effort onlooker.
There are norms that dislike when people don’t respond to criticism. If you are not a carrier, there’s that, it won’t bother you personally[1], but there are others who will be affected. If you ignore a norm, it fades away or fights back. So it’s important to distinguish the positive claim from the normative claim, whether the norm asking people to respond to criticism is a good one to have around, not just whether it’s a real norm with some influence.
The norm of responding to criticism causes problems, despite the obvious arguments in support of it. Its presence makes authors uncomfortable, anticipating the obligation to respond, which creates incentives to prevent ambiguously useless criticism or for such critics to politely self-censor, and so other readers or the author miss out on the criticism that turns out to be on-point.
If on balance the norm seems currently too powerful, then all else equal it’s useful to intentionally ignore it, even as you know that it’s there in some people’s minds. When it fights back, it can make the carriers uncomfortable and annoyed, or visit punishment upon the disobedient, so all else is not equal. But perhaps it’s unjust of it to make its blackmail-like demands, even as the carriers are arguably not centrally personally responsible for the demands or even the consequences of delivering the punishment. And so even with the negative side effects of ignoring the norm there are some sort of arguments for doing that anyway.
Unless you are the author, because you’ll still experience disapproval from the carriers of the norm in the audience if you fail to obey its expectations about your behavior, even if you are not yourself a carrier.