(I had drafted a long reply to this which still needed more work, but I’ve rather gone over the limit of how much time to spend arguing about moderation on LessWrong this month, so I decided not to finish it. Nonetheless, FWIW, I thought this was a good comment and made some good counterpoints and I upvoted it. I think you’re right that it is often a weakness to be strongly affected by it, and that post-replies have many weakness compared to arguing in the comments, but I would want to defend that there are many worthy environments for public writing about how the world works where it makes sense for people with that weakness to optimize at-all for comfort over criticism, and also that it’s not a weakness in many contexts to use contempt/disgust to track real threats and people who aren’t worth talking to, it’s just accurate.)
(I had drafted a long reply to this which still needed more work, but I’ve rather gone over the limit of how much time to spend arguing about moderation on LessWrong this month, so I decided not to finish it. Nonetheless, FWIW, I thought this was a good comment and made some good counterpoints and I upvoted it. I think you’re right that it is often a weakness to be strongly affected by it, and that post-replies have many weakness compared to arguing in the comments, but I would want to defend that there are many worthy environments for public writing about how the world works where it makes sense for people with that weakness to optimize at-all for comfort over criticism, and also that it’s not a weakness in many contexts to use contempt/disgust to track real threats and people who aren’t worth talking to, it’s just accurate.)