He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place!
I don’t think just because you use a personal example in order to communicate (and possible defend) the core thesis of a post, that this hereby opens you up to have all vaguely-relevant personal information about you discussed and dissected in the comment section.
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
To be clear, that kind of information can be quite important to share for other reasons (and I have many times in the past written up my concerns with various community leaders both on LW and the EA Forum), but in as much as someone is trying to argue for any kind of generalized principles on a specific post, I think it’s definitely within the bounds of moderatable action if someone brings up a bunch of personal information in an aggressive way.
I do think that kind of stuff is often appropriate for other places on the site.
And to be clear, I think someone can succeed at raising the relevant points in a way that doesn’t predictably derail the whole discussion, and also signals appropriate respect for people’s public/private boundaries, but one should model this as a quite dicey operation that is reasonably likely to fail, and if someone wants to do this, I would expect attempts at cooperating and not letting the discussion fall into one of the standard internet demon thread attractors. If someone doesn’t have that skill, I think they shouldn’t attempt it (and just post the information somewhere else).
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
It does seem to me like an invitation[1] to say “Actually, I’ve spoken with a few of this guy’s previous managers and all three of them say he used the same strat on his projects at their firms, but his predictions were way off.”
But that’s not quite the crux of the matter; what’s critical (for you, at least) is the capacity to derail convos into off-topic Demon Threads, if there is too much aggression or not enough respect or too many boundaries broken.[2]
That’s not quite so critical for me, but I’m not a mod, and I have written enough about this already, and for that reason I shall stop it here.
I don’t think just because you use a personal example in order to communicate (and possible defend) the core thesis of a post, that this hereby opens you up to have all vaguely-relevant personal information about you discussed and dissected in the comment section.
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
To be clear, that kind of information can be quite important to share for other reasons (and I have many times in the past written up my concerns with various community leaders both on LW and the EA Forum), but in as much as someone is trying to argue for any kind of generalized principles on a specific post, I think it’s definitely within the bounds of moderatable action if someone brings up a bunch of personal information in an aggressive way.
I do think that kind of stuff is often appropriate for other places on the site.
And to be clear, I think someone can succeed at raising the relevant points in a way that doesn’t predictably derail the whole discussion, and also signals appropriate respect for people’s public/private boundaries, but one should model this as a quite dicey operation that is reasonably likely to fail, and if someone wants to do this, I would expect attempts at cooperating and not letting the discussion fall into one of the standard internet demon thread attractors. If someone doesn’t have that skill, I think they shouldn’t attempt it (and just post the information somewhere else).
It does seem to me like an invitation[1] to say “Actually, I’ve spoken with a few of this guy’s previous managers and all three of them say he used the same strat on his projects at their firms, but his predictions were way off.”
But that’s not quite the crux of the matter; what’s critical (for you, at least) is the capacity to derail convos into off-topic Demon Threads, if there is too much aggression or not enough respect or too many boundaries broken.[2]
That’s not quite so critical for me, but I’m not a mod, and I have written enough about this already, and for that reason I shall stop it here.
Not the word I’d use, but this isn’t the time to litigate such matters
Plus other stuff like authors leaving the site, etc.