If I complain at a restaurant that the soup is too salty, and the cook makes a new one, and now I complain that this one is too spicy (let’s assume the previous one was not), am I moving the goalpost?
I don’t know how to define the rules for what is proper criticism. Sometimes the utility function is too complex to express clearly. (And sometimes the person just sucks at expressing themselves clearly.)
On the other hand, if a situation is inherently a tradeoff between X and Y, and the person says “too much X” and later “too much Y”, it makes sense to tell them “hey, we all know that this is a tradeoff between X and Y, so either tell us what proportion of X to Y you want, or shut up”. (Then again, the person might challenge the idea that the tradeoff is inevitable. But better if they do it explicitly, rather than just complaining about X one day, and about Y the other day.)
On the meta level, it’s the same problem again—I can’t give you the proper rules for criticism, but I can say when I feel that people are going too far in certain direction. So I am unconstructively criticizing the very idea of criticism, heh.
If I complain at a restaurant that the soup is too salty, and the cook makes a new one, and now I complain that this one is too spicy (let’s assume the previous one was not), am I moving the goalpost?
I don’t know how to define the rules for what is proper criticism. Sometimes the utility function is too complex to express clearly. (And sometimes the person just sucks at expressing themselves clearly.)
On the other hand, if a situation is inherently a tradeoff between X and Y, and the person says “too much X” and later “too much Y”, it makes sense to tell them “hey, we all know that this is a tradeoff between X and Y, so either tell us what proportion of X to Y you want, or shut up”. (Then again, the person might challenge the idea that the tradeoff is inevitable. But better if they do it explicitly, rather than just complaining about X one day, and about Y the other day.)
On the meta level, it’s the same problem again—I can’t give you the proper rules for criticism, but I can say when I feel that people are going too far in certain direction. So I am unconstructively criticizing the very idea of criticism, heh.