This reminds me of the distinction between debate and dialectic. Both can be means to truth seeking, both have their own failure modes (debate can become about winning instead of the truth; dialectic can become confused without adequate experience with synthesis), and different people can have a preference for one over the other. Thinking in terms of a culture though is perhaps better suited to what’s going on than talking about preference for a particular technique because it gets at something deeper fueling that preference for particular methods.
Also, for what it’s worth, I found this post useful enough at describing what I want to moderate towards that I’ve linked it now from my LW moderation guidelines to indicate I want people to prefer nurture to combat culture in the comments on my posts. I think a failure to have this well explained helps explain why things went in a direction I didn’t like in a recent contentious post I made.
This reminds me of the distinction between debate and dialectic. Both can be means to truth seeking, both have their own failure modes (debate can become about winning instead of the truth; dialectic can become confused without adequate experience with synthesis), and different people can have a preference for one over the other. Thinking in terms of a culture though is perhaps better suited to what’s going on than talking about preference for a particular technique because it gets at something deeper fueling that preference for particular methods.
Also, for what it’s worth, I found this post useful enough at describing what I want to moderate towards that I’ve linked it now from my LW moderation guidelines to indicate I want people to prefer nurture to combat culture in the comments on my posts. I think a failure to have this well explained helps explain why things went in a direction I didn’t like in a recent contentious post I made.