I’m curious exactly what that might entail. Are there any good examples you can give where someone gives a hypothesis, and then some critique in a certain direction / magnitude causes them to shift?
Well, I think the recent Dragon Army post and subsequent discussion was a good example. It generated a huge volume of critique, much of it following Norm One, and some of it not. The stuff that did follow Norm One actually did point mainly in the same direction, and mostly consisted of suggestions for how to make the system more robust to failure and implementing proper safe-guards. This did seem to cause Duncan to update his plan in that direction, and made it a lot more palatable to some (consider Scott Alexander’s shift of opinion on it).
Contrast that with the more hostile criticism from that discussion, which probably caused no one to update in any direction, and if anything made it more likely for people to become entrenched in their views.
Cool. I think I agree with the general spirit of making criticism that follows these guidelines.
I think the thing I’m having trouble parsing is how to translate typical critique into the style of Norm One. My current interpretation is something like, “Give small, incremental suggestions that they can actually implement, rather than larger, more nebulous vague-pointing things. (And if you want to do the nebulous thing, maybe only do that after giving the small incremental stuff and use the nebulous thing as more of a goalpost of what you intend by giving the incremental stuff.)”
Well, I think the recent Dragon Army post and subsequent discussion was a good example. It generated a huge volume of critique, much of it following Norm One, and some of it not. The stuff that did follow Norm One actually did point mainly in the same direction, and mostly consisted of suggestions for how to make the system more robust to failure and implementing proper safe-guards. This did seem to cause Duncan to update his plan in that direction, and made it a lot more palatable to some (consider Scott Alexander’s shift of opinion on it).
Contrast that with the more hostile criticism from that discussion, which probably caused no one to update in any direction, and if anything made it more likely for people to become entrenched in their views.
Cool. I think I agree with the general spirit of making criticism that follows these guidelines.
I think the thing I’m having trouble parsing is how to translate typical critique into the style of Norm One. My current interpretation is something like, “Give small, incremental suggestions that they can actually implement, rather than larger, more nebulous vague-pointing things. (And if you want to do the nebulous thing, maybe only do that after giving the small incremental stuff and use the nebulous thing as more of a goalpost of what you intend by giving the incremental stuff.)”