One thing re: missing moods is that while I think there’s room for improvement on the “be able to make criticisms without them being attacks” front, I think solving this looks quite different from the way you (and Duncan of 1.5 years ago) were trying to solve it.
There are fundamental limitations of a public forum, and of sprawling, heated discussions in particular. I think it will always require costly demonstrations of good faith in order to do make strong criticisms in public without being perceived as attacking. I think if you attempt to do this, you are just laying down norms that enable and incentive politicians, resulting in less clarity, not more.
But there are two options that both seem relatively straightforward to me:
1. Make criticisms, and employ a lot of costly signaling that you are arguing in good faith.
2. Have a norm wherein people discuss criticism in private, and then afterwards publish a public document that they both endorse. (This may in some cases require counterfactual willingness to write critiques that are attacks)
I generally prefer the latter once a conversation has begun to branch and get heated. Once a conversation has become multithreaded and involve serious disagreements, maintaining good faith becomes exponentially more expensive.
(I also think it’s just sort of okay for there to be a mutual understanding and clarify that some classes of feedback need to be treated as indistinguishable from attacks, which means they need to be somewhat socially punished to disincentive coalition politics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also get listened to)
One thing re: missing moods is that while I think there’s room for improvement on the “be able to make criticisms without them being attacks” front, I think solving this looks quite different from the way you (and Duncan of 1.5 years ago) were trying to solve it.
There are fundamental limitations of a public forum, and of sprawling, heated discussions in particular. I think it will always require costly demonstrations of good faith in order to do make strong criticisms in public without being perceived as attacking. I think if you attempt to do this, you are just laying down norms that enable and incentive politicians, resulting in less clarity, not more.
But there are two options that both seem relatively straightforward to me:
1. Make criticisms, and employ a lot of costly signaling that you are arguing in good faith.
2. Have a norm wherein people discuss criticism in private, and then afterwards publish a public document that they both endorse. (This may in some cases require counterfactual willingness to write critiques that are attacks)
I generally prefer the latter once a conversation has begun to branch and get heated. Once a conversation has become multithreaded and involve serious disagreements, maintaining good faith becomes exponentially more expensive.
(I also think it’s just sort of okay for there to be a mutual understanding and clarify that some classes of feedback need to be treated as indistinguishable from attacks, which means they need to be somewhat socially punished to disincentive coalition politics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also get listened to)