I like the “echo” metaphor. Generally, awareness of impact further down the road is a good thing, but there’s a rather unpleasant phenomenon that happens when you turn up the gain so high that the echoes created in response to picking up echoes become louder than the initial echoes that created them. You get “feedback” and that loud high pitch squeal. This is a good reason to be mindful not to place too much gain on echoes, as well as to be mindful of whether your response to them is damping them back to the first order message or exciting them further.
Another analogy for this is stock market trading. You can speculate on how other investors will react to the news to some number of echoes, or you can just try to figure out what the true value is and hold on long enough for the echoes to dissipate. To make this work though, you have to be able to eat short term losses and think on longer horizons. And if the investor response is predictable enough, and worth the effort to predict, value investing will be leaving money on the table.
When it comes to commenting and deciding whether to intentionally try to preempt an obligation to respond, this “value investing” approach is to just explain your perspective without trying to thumb the scale in either direction. Rather than leaning on “And if you don’t respond, it’s because you know I’m right and can’t admit it” or “It couldn’t possibly be that, and surely your post is correct despite my criticisms”, you can just make your comment trust the best estimate of the truth to win once things settle out. I think some of what looks like disingenuous “What? Just don’t respond?” comes from this.
For example, if Alice is one of those you describe as “Innocent, but naive”, she might comment on Bob’s post without thinking much about what it might imply if Bob doesn’t reply. “We’ll get there when/if we get there”. Because whether her comment is upvoted or downvoted changes the answer. Whether there are other comments along the same lines or in response to hers matters, as does what stance these comments take. Alice just trusts the audience and herself to make reasonable inferences, once the cards are on the table.
If Bob doesn’t feel like “I don’t have to respond, the audience will see that my point stands”, then that points to Bob not having finished crossing that inferential distance and justifying his stance in the eyes of his audience. So long as Alice’s object level counterargument is sincere, then avoiding making it to spare Bob the effort of explaining things isn’t a good thing—because now people still don’t get it, and if they turn out to be correct it’s because they’re lucky that the holes they don’t see don’t turn out to matter. But Alice can’t know whether they will or not until she see’s Bob’s response. Unless she happens to have special knowledge that the audience is likely to underestimate Bob’s post relative to her comment, urging the audience to refrain from updating won’t actually point towards truth—because she doesn’t actually know anything they don’t about this.
I do actually agree that these responses are often disingenuous, because of a particular social dynamic where one can subtly and plausibly deniably posture as being above the author and win points when their arguments pan out, while being simultaneously shielded from the consequences when they turn out to be wrong (as an author, how comfortable do you feel calling people out for such posturing? How much do you trust the audience to do it for you?). In such cultures, the norms incentivize this sort of posturing so long as it can be kept below the audience’s ability to recognize it or feel confident in diagnosing it. And if the audience doesn’t see and grok this dynamic, then they’re going to update on the information conveyed in the “confident” posture. And in such cultures the general audience doesn’t grok this dynamic, or else they wouldn’t enable it to persist.
Authors can sense this, and the situation where both the commenter and author know that the commenter is taking advantage of this hole in the collective epistemology but the commenter won’t admit it, is disappointingly common. Less common on LW than elsewhere, but not absent.
At the end of the day, there are both situations where the author rationally and correctly sees “What? Just don’t comment!” as disingenuous or naive, and also situations where it’s just a fact of life that if you want your audience to understand you, you’re going to have to respond to comments that convincingly-but-incorrectly argue against your post[1]. It’s just a question of whether that comment putting pressure on the author to respond is (intentionally or unintentionally) relying on getting shielded from the consequences of coming at the author overconfidently, or whether they’re making the comment holding themselves accountable.
(To be clear, I don’t see this as a criticism that requires a response, as it doesn’t negate the main thesis. I expect the audience to recognize this though, so I wouldn’t ordinarily make a point of saying this)
To make this work though, you have to be able to eat short term losses and think on longer horizons.
A wise man once said that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. In actual practice, it turns out that, even if you’re 100% correct that a bubble exists, it’s still really hard to make money by betting against it, because the only ways to do that involve holding onto an investment that is constantly hemmoraging money until the moment when the bubble finally does “burst”. If the market persists in undervaluing an asset you can just HODL and come out ahead in the long run, but if you try to HODL a short position, you just keep on losing more and more money every day the bubble fails to burst.
I like the “echo” metaphor. Generally, awareness of impact further down the road is a good thing, but there’s a rather unpleasant phenomenon that happens when you turn up the gain so high that the echoes created in response to picking up echoes become louder than the initial echoes that created them. You get “feedback” and that loud high pitch squeal. This is a good reason to be mindful not to place too much gain on echoes, as well as to be mindful of whether your response to them is damping them back to the first order message or exciting them further.
Another analogy for this is stock market trading. You can speculate on how other investors will react to the news to some number of echoes, or you can just try to figure out what the true value is and hold on long enough for the echoes to dissipate. To make this work though, you have to be able to eat short term losses and think on longer horizons. And if the investor response is predictable enough, and worth the effort to predict, value investing will be leaving money on the table.
When it comes to commenting and deciding whether to intentionally try to preempt an obligation to respond, this “value investing” approach is to just explain your perspective without trying to thumb the scale in either direction. Rather than leaning on “And if you don’t respond, it’s because you know I’m right and can’t admit it” or “It couldn’t possibly be that, and surely your post is correct despite my criticisms”, you can just make your comment trust the best estimate of the truth to win once things settle out. I think some of what looks like disingenuous “What? Just don’t respond?” comes from this.
For example, if Alice is one of those you describe as “Innocent, but naive”, she might comment on Bob’s post without thinking much about what it might imply if Bob doesn’t reply. “We’ll get there when/if we get there”. Because whether her comment is upvoted or downvoted changes the answer. Whether there are other comments along the same lines or in response to hers matters, as does what stance these comments take. Alice just trusts the audience and herself to make reasonable inferences, once the cards are on the table.
If Bob doesn’t feel like “I don’t have to respond, the audience will see that my point stands”, then that points to Bob not having finished crossing that inferential distance and justifying his stance in the eyes of his audience. So long as Alice’s object level counterargument is sincere, then avoiding making it to spare Bob the effort of explaining things isn’t a good thing—because now people still don’t get it, and if they turn out to be correct it’s because they’re lucky that the holes they don’t see don’t turn out to matter. But Alice can’t know whether they will or not until she see’s Bob’s response. Unless she happens to have special knowledge that the audience is likely to underestimate Bob’s post relative to her comment, urging the audience to refrain from updating won’t actually point towards truth—because she doesn’t actually know anything they don’t about this.
I do actually agree that these responses are often disingenuous, because of a particular social dynamic where one can subtly and plausibly deniably posture as being above the author and win points when their arguments pan out, while being simultaneously shielded from the consequences when they turn out to be wrong (as an author, how comfortable do you feel calling people out for such posturing? How much do you trust the audience to do it for you?). In such cultures, the norms incentivize this sort of posturing so long as it can be kept below the audience’s ability to recognize it or feel confident in diagnosing it. And if the audience doesn’t see and grok this dynamic, then they’re going to update on the information conveyed in the “confident” posture. And in such cultures the general audience doesn’t grok this dynamic, or else they wouldn’t enable it to persist.
Authors can sense this, and the situation where both the commenter and author know that the commenter is taking advantage of this hole in the collective epistemology but the commenter won’t admit it, is disappointingly common. Less common on LW than elsewhere, but not absent.
At the end of the day, there are both situations where the author rationally and correctly sees “What? Just don’t comment!” as disingenuous or naive, and also situations where it’s just a fact of life that if you want your audience to understand you, you’re going to have to respond to comments that convincingly-but-incorrectly argue against your post[1]. It’s just a question of whether that comment putting pressure on the author to respond is (intentionally or unintentionally) relying on getting shielded from the consequences of coming at the author overconfidently, or whether they’re making the comment holding themselves accountable.
(To be clear, I don’t see this as a criticism that requires a response, as it doesn’t negate the main thesis. I expect the audience to recognize this though, so I wouldn’t ordinarily make a point of saying this)
Unless you happen to nail it on the first go, I guess, but doing that consistently is even harder
A wise man once said that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. In actual practice, it turns out that, even if you’re 100% correct that a bubble exists, it’s still really hard to make money by betting against it, because the only ways to do that involve holding onto an investment that is constantly hemmoraging money until the moment when the bubble finally does “burst”. If the market persists in undervaluing an asset you can just HODL and come out ahead in the long run, but if you try to HODL a short position, you just keep on losing more and more money every day the bubble fails to burst.