Top-level posts are not self-limiting (from a status perspective) in the way I described for a critical comment. If you come up with a great new idea, it can become a popular post read and reread by many over the years and you can become known for being its author. But if you come up with a great critical comment that debunks a post, the post will be downvoted and forgotten, and very few people will remember your role in debunking it.
I agree this is largely true for comments (largely by necessity of how comment visibility works)[1]. Indeed one thing I frequently encourage good commenters to do is to try to generalize their comments more and post them as top-level posts.
Dialogues were also another attempt at making it so that critique is less self-limiting, by making it so that a more conversation can happen at the same level as a post. I don’t think that plan succeeded amazingly well (largely because dialogues ended up hard to read, and hard to coordinate between authors), but it is a thing I care a lot about and expect to do more work on.
The popular comments section on the frontpage has also changed this situation a non-trivial amount. It is now the case that if you write a very good critique that causes a post to be downvoted, that this will still result in your comment getting a lot of visibility on the frontpage. Indeed, just this very moment we have a critique by sunwillrise with a bunch more karma than the post it is replying to prominent on the frontpage:
Top-level posts are not self-limiting (from a status perspective) in the way I described for a critical comment. If you come up with a great new idea, it can become a popular post read and reread by many over the years and you can become known for being its author. But if you come up with a great critical comment that debunks a post, the post will be downvoted and forgotten, and very few people will remember your role in debunking it.
I agree this is largely true for comments (largely by necessity of how comment visibility works)[1]. Indeed one thing I frequently encourage good commenters to do is to try to generalize their comments more and post them as top-level posts.
And as far as I can tell this is an enormously successful mechanism for getting highly-upvoted posts on LessWrong. Indeed, I would classify the current second most-upvoted post of all time on LessWrong as a post of this kind: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer
Dialogues were also another attempt at making it so that critique is less self-limiting, by making it so that a more conversation can happen at the same level as a post. I don’t think that plan succeeded amazingly well (largely because dialogues ended up hard to read, and hard to coordinate between authors), but it is a thing I care a lot about and expect to do more work on.
The popular comments section on the frontpage has also changed this situation a non-trivial amount. It is now the case that if you write a very good critique that causes a post to be downvoted, that this will still result in your comment getting a lot of visibility on the frontpage. Indeed, just this very moment we have a critique by sunwillrise with a bunch more karma than the post it is replying to prominent on the frontpage:
Though I do think it’s been changing and we’ve made some improvements on this dimension, see my last paragraph