I like the reminder about someone else’s post. I agree good participation in this process is sometimes frustrating. I am not convinced that being frustrating is strong evidence of something being good. I expect there are plenty of possible and actual critiques whose responses should include a sentence like “it would have been a more useful critique if the author had read my point properly” or “the critique contained good points, but was 100x longer than necessary—a single paper would have been clearer, writing a prose book first buried the scientific lede” or other procedural issues that make the critique less useful for avoidable reasons. I expect most forms of frustration are counterevidence of good debate, even if good debate reliably causes frustration in minds who are arguing a false claim. There are forms of making it hard that are within good debate for n+1 to comment on about level n.
I expect there are plenty of possible and actual critiques whose responses should include a sentence like “it would have been a more useful critique if the author had read my point properly”
Smalley, though, didn’t read Nanosystems. I’m pretty sure of this. I don’t think you can tell from his Scientific American article. But it becomes pretty clear in the “debate”. Drexler wrote an open letter to Smalley, and Smalley’s response includes this revealing paragraph: ...
So when I say that Smalley’s objections are at least addressed (convincingly or not) in Nanosystems, I don’t infer that Smalley must have read this and made the objections anyway. He didn’t read it.
I am not convinced that being frustrating is strong evidence of something being good.
That’s not at all the claim that OP is making. Rather, the claim is that being frustrating is not evidence that the given element of the discussion is bad.
This updates me somewhat. I think your wording here works as “not courtroom evidence” or “not proof”, but bayesian evidence is sensitive to ratios even if that makes it a heuristic that almost works. also, frustration seems to me to be a fairly clear cost even if it’s a cost that must sometimes be paid; trying to reduce the range of circumstances where that cost must be paid seems like, in isolation, a worthy thing to try. the question would then be how that trades off, which is more complex. I expect that there are often small wording/communication things one can do to make incidental frustration less likely, by eg increasing clarity, being careful with emphasis, being careful to not include an interlocutor’s deep character as a target of criticism prematurely, otherwise minimizing effort needed by the interlocutor in order to understand, or other such things. it’s easy for me to imagine scenarios where someone with a real point is nevertheless causing a high rate of incidental frustration that is not necessary to make the point.
I like the reminder about someone else’s post. I agree good participation in this process is sometimes frustrating. I am not convinced that being frustrating is strong evidence of something being good. I expect there are plenty of possible and actual critiques whose responses should include a sentence like “it would have been a more useful critique if the author had read my point properly” or “the critique contained good points, but was 100x longer than necessary—a single paper would have been clearer, writing a prose book first buried the scientific lede” or other procedural issues that make the critique less useful for avoidable reasons. I expect most forms of frustration are counterevidence of good debate, even if good debate reliably causes frustration in minds who are arguing a false claim. There are forms of making it hard that are within good debate for n+1 to comment on about level n.
This reminded me of @transhumanist_atom_understander’s commentary on tumblr about the Smalley-Drexler debate:
That’s not at all the claim that OP is making. Rather, the claim is that being frustrating is not evidence that the given element of the discussion is bad.
This updates me somewhat. I think your wording here works as “not courtroom evidence” or “not proof”, but bayesian evidence is sensitive to ratios even if that makes it a heuristic that almost works. also, frustration seems to me to be a fairly clear cost even if it’s a cost that must sometimes be paid; trying to reduce the range of circumstances where that cost must be paid seems like, in isolation, a worthy thing to try. the question would then be how that trades off, which is more complex. I expect that there are often small wording/communication things one can do to make incidental frustration less likely, by eg increasing clarity, being careful with emphasis, being careful to not include an interlocutor’s deep character as a target of criticism prematurely, otherwise minimizing effort needed by the interlocutor in order to understand, or other such things. it’s easy for me to imagine scenarios where someone with a real point is nevertheless causing a high rate of incidental frustration that is not necessary to make the point.