Ideally I would link to concrete examples but I’m afraid it would come across as me calling out someone else, especially if they believe they put in their best effort in writing a serious essay, so I will have to leave it to your imagination.
For the record, I think critiques can accurately describe someone’s writing critically without being an unreasonable aggression, and I think critiques are much better for concreteness. I think your post would be 2-5x as valuable for me if I had concrete posts in mind as what you were pointing to, when you discuss old posts that were better than new posts, or posts that use jargon more than academia to an excessive degree.
Perhaps, though I have yet to see any successful examples of such a comparison. And it may be a moral hazard regardless with deleterious second, and higher, order effects.
Hm, I think there are lots of examples. First to come to mind is a recent reply to Eliezer by Holden, of which I think a severe criticism was respectfully described like this:
Something like half of this post is blockquotes. I’ve often been surprised by the degree to which people (including people I respect a lot, such as Eliezer in this case) seem to mischaracterize specific pieces they critique , and I try to avoid this for myself by quoting extensively from a piece when critiquing it.
And lines like this:
“Most of Eliezer’s critique seems directed at assumptions the report explicitly does not make about how transformative AI will be developed, and more broadly, about the connection between its (the report’s) compute estimates and all-things-considered AI timelines.”
This appears to be mostly, if not entirely, concerned with the substantive content of a post, not the style or manner of writing. Style criticisms are a lot trickier and I’m not sure if it’s possible to avoid hurt feelings one way or another.
For the record, I think critiques can accurately describe someone’s writing critically without being an unreasonable aggression, and I think critiques are much better for concreteness. I think your post would be 2-5x as valuable for me if I had concrete posts in mind as what you were pointing to, when you discuss old posts that were better than new posts, or posts that use jargon more than academia to an excessive degree.
Perhaps, though I have yet to see any successful examples of such a comparison. And it may be a moral hazard regardless with deleterious second, and higher, order effects.
Hm, I think there are lots of examples. First to come to mind is a recent reply to Eliezer by Holden, of which I think a severe criticism was respectfully described like this:
And lines like this:
This appears to be mostly, if not entirely, concerned with the substantive content of a post, not the style or manner of writing. Style criticisms are a lot trickier and I’m not sure if it’s possible to avoid hurt feelings one way or another.
Fair point.