I’m still not sure what Zack or Said think of the Royal Society example; Zack talks about it a bit in another comment on that page but not in a way that feels connected to the question of how to balance virtues against each other, and what virtues cultures should strive towards. (Said, in an email, strongly rejects my claim that there’s a difference between his culture of commenting and the Royal Society culture of commenting that I describe.)
This seems to be by far the most important crux, nothing else could’ve substantially changed attitudes on either side. Do environments widely recognized for excellence and intellectual progress generally have cultures of harsh and blunt criticism, and to what degree its presence/absence is a load-bearing part? This question also looks pretty important on its own, and the apparent lack of interest/attention is confusing.
Do environments widely recognized for excellence and intellectual progress generally have cultures of harsh and blunt criticism
To the best of my ability to detect, the answer is clearly and obviously “no” — there’s an important property of people not-bullshitting and not doing the LinkedIn thing, but you can actually do clear and honest and constructively critical communication without assholery (and it seems to me that the people who lump the two together have a skill issue and some sort of color-blindness; because they don’t know how to get the good parts of candor and criticism while not unduly hurting feelings, they assume that it can’t be done).
This seems to be by far the most important crux, nothing else could’ve substantially changed attitudes on either side. Do environments widely recognized for excellence and intellectual progress generally have cultures of harsh and blunt criticism, and to what degree its presence/absence is a load-bearing part? This question also looks pretty important on its own, and the apparent lack of interest/attention is confusing.
To the best of my ability to detect, the answer is clearly and obviously “no” — there’s an important property of people not-bullshitting and not doing the LinkedIn thing, but you can actually do clear and honest and constructively critical communication without assholery (and it seems to me that the people who lump the two together have a skill issue and some sort of color-blindness; because they don’t know how to get the good parts of candor and criticism while not unduly hurting feelings, they assume that it can’t be done).
probably buried in noise, maybe write a question post about it?