When I block people on FB, I do so because I don’t consider their contributions to discussions valuable and don’t really care about them. If I’m correct about how much they matter, then presumably it’s fine if they can’t meaningfully participate in conversations. Furthermore, I don’t think this is an unusual blocking pattern for people who block people on FB and participate in rationality community discussions.
Counterpoints:
There’s a unilateralist curse problem where if just one person underestimates how valuable a person’s contributions are, they don’t get to fully participate in discussions. Hopefully this can be fixed by holding a high bar for blocking?
Even if you don’t want people to participate in discussions, you often want them to see the discussion. A common case of this is when a norm is being hashed out that you want everybody to follow. (You could attempt to fix this by only blocking people who are peripheral enough to communities of concern that you don’t care about their behaviour, but sadly your friends probably have slightly different communities of concern that you’re bad at determining the boundaries of.)
If you’re reading a big community thread, then even if nobody has blocked you, if you don’t know that nobody has blocked you (and you don’t) then you have an overhead of not knowing if you can see all the discussion, which probably makes discussions worse. This is a cost that you can only eliminate by having blocking be extremely uncommon.
When I block people on FB, I do so because I don’t consider their contributions to discussions valuable and don’t really care about them. If I’m correct about how much they matter, then presumably it’s fine if they can’t meaningfully participate in conversations. Furthermore, I don’t think this is an unusual blocking pattern for people who block people on FB and participate in rationality community discussions.
Counterpoints:
There’s a unilateralist curse problem where if just one person underestimates how valuable a person’s contributions are, they don’t get to fully participate in discussions. Hopefully this can be fixed by holding a high bar for blocking?
Even if you don’t want people to participate in discussions, you often want them to see the discussion. A common case of this is when a norm is being hashed out that you want everybody to follow. (You could attempt to fix this by only blocking people who are peripheral enough to communities of concern that you don’t care about their behaviour, but sadly your friends probably have slightly different communities of concern that you’re bad at determining the boundaries of.)
If you’re reading a big community thread, then even if nobody has blocked you, if you don’t know that nobody has blocked you (and you don’t) then you have an overhead of not knowing if you can see all the discussion, which probably makes discussions worse. This is a cost that you can only eliminate by having blocking be extremely uncommon.
Content:
Or have discussions that don’t include disagreeing pairs. (Or maybe moderation could help with this?)
Or by having a public block list.
Style:
underestimates?
The type of discussion I’m talking about is open-ended community discussion, so it would be weird to limit it such.
TBC, you need the vast majority of people to have a public block list for this to work.
Thanks, fixed.