I’m saying it’s not orthogonal to what I’m interested in measuring here, which is the impact of this policy on the visibility of critique. I’ll grant that’s not exactly what Eric seems to be considering in the comment above; sorry for the miscommunication.
Those critique posts seem to mainly be by popular authors, and quite long. I believe they additionally are mainly responses to posts that were themselves unusually popular, which is important because it means the author can assume a sort of common knowledge that a critique of a mid-level post would otherwise have to establish. I agree that Wei Dai could have achieved that, but that you are significantly underestimating the costs to him of doing so. And I’m also concerned about the case where the author does not have as strong of a reputation, of course.
I’ll grant that’s not exactly what Eric seems to be considering in the comment above; sorry for the miscommunication.
Cool, yeah, I was just saying you will have to adjust somehow for timeliness and effort from the baseline that Eric was proposing.
that you are significantly underestimating the costs to him of doing so
I haven’t made any statements about the cost. I think the cost is non-trivial, but it feels like the kind of thing that seems well in-line with other nudges and affordance-shaping we do on the site. In as much as there is a really crucial misunderstanding that people are forming, where they are using Wei’s absence of a response as evidence that a thing is robust or valid or good, then making a post allows you to address that.
Yes, the cost is somewhat higher than with a high-effort comment, but it just seems like an adequate solution to me, the same way that comments seem like an adequate solution to me, and I don’t need a publicly visible “I disendorse this” button at the bottom of each post that provides a minimum-effort way of expressing your opinion on something.
I’m saying it’s not orthogonal to what I’m interested in measuring here, which is the impact of this policy on the visibility of critique. I’ll grant that’s not exactly what Eric seems to be considering in the comment above; sorry for the miscommunication.
Those critique posts seem to mainly be by popular authors, and quite long. I believe they additionally are mainly responses to posts that were themselves unusually popular, which is important because it means the author can assume a sort of common knowledge that a critique of a mid-level post would otherwise have to establish. I agree that Wei Dai could have achieved that, but that you are significantly underestimating the costs to him of doing so. And I’m also concerned about the case where the author does not have as strong of a reputation, of course.
Cool, yeah, I was just saying you will have to adjust somehow for timeliness and effort from the baseline that Eric was proposing.
I haven’t made any statements about the cost. I think the cost is non-trivial, but it feels like the kind of thing that seems well in-line with other nudges and affordance-shaping we do on the site. In as much as there is a really crucial misunderstanding that people are forming, where they are using Wei’s absence of a response as evidence that a thing is robust or valid or good, then making a post allows you to address that.
Yes, the cost is somewhat higher than with a high-effort comment, but it just seems like an adequate solution to me, the same way that comments seem like an adequate solution to me, and I don’t need a publicly visible “I disendorse this” button at the bottom of each post that provides a minimum-effort way of expressing your opinion on something.