Discovery, Convenience, Presentation
I’ve been playing with ways of trying to break down “critique” or “criticism”.
EAs have a complex relationship with criticism. There are contests with big rewards to do criticism, and select critical posts get lots of upvotes. At the same time, there’s often a lot of anger at Twitter people who criticize EA. Critical comments on the EA Forum are sometimes heavily downvoted and sometimes heavily upvoted. It’s very difficult to draw any line in the sand regarding good and bad criticism.
Scott Alexander’s post Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism, outlined this tension.
One step is to apply discernment, and try to divide up the critical properties of criticism.[2]
Let’s try splitting criticism into the properties “discovery”, “convenience”, and “presentation.”
Astute readers might notice that these properties really apply more broadly to “communication about sensitive or political topics.”
Discovery
How much valuable new information is presented? “Valuable” here means “long-term useful, to the population at large”.
“Information” implies entropy. Heavily redundant writing is low-information, or low-discovery.
Discovery implies work. How much work would it have taken for others to have found this information, or something very similar?
The term discovery comes from the domain of Law. It’s chosen to imply neutrality to bias, convenience, or presentation.
If the reader could predict most of the content, then the content is low-discovery. For example, an angry rant from someone on effective altruism, where the critic just found some list online of “10 arguments against effective altruism” and rehashes each one. Or an ideological rant about how effective altruism has a mismatch from Objectivism, revealing no insight other than what one could get from a very trivial Wikipedia skim. These rants reveal almost nothing for a decently well reader who reads the title.
Discovery and Bias:
If evidence is discovered by using a biased selection method, then we could call that biased discovery. If the receiver recognizes the bias, then they can properly adjust for it. Biased discovery can be very useful for a bias-aware receiver, but actively deceptive to a bias-unaware receiver.
Convenience
“Convenience” refers to the short-term or localized cost or benefit to a set of parties.
Lets start with a few examples. Imagine that you are making a public blog post that’s targetted to a certain organization.
Convenient communication would be things like:
-
“Your organization is actually far better than you realized.”
-
“Your business didn’t notice this one great hack, that would save it 10% of its costs.”
-
“Your ideologies’ goals could better be achieved by this (very reasonable) strategy. Inconvenient communication would include:
-
“Your CEO has committed treason. Here’s clear evidence.”
-
“Your organization is vastly harmful to the world.”
-
“All your customers would be better off with competitors.” “Convenient communication”, is that which is EV-positive for an agent, and “inconvenient communication” is that which is EV-negative. This is primarily relevant for communication shared broadly - if it’s just shared confidentially with the agent in question, the inconvenience can be minimized.
If you criticized Joe Biden, saying that his environmental agenda has a clear gap in it, and actually both voters and lobbyists would be happy with him for filling this gap, this could be very useful, of convenient criticism. If instead, you flagged an issue publicly that was impossible for him to change, and would upset a bunch of voters and lobbyists, that would be inconvenient.
“Convenience” is a slippery word. Its definition changes based on the context, and the context is often implicit.A formal distinction between discovery and convenience would involve defining two distinct agents; one of which is more local or proximal than the other in some way. “Discovery” refers to the value gain by the more global agent, “convenience” for the more local agent.
| Communication | Discovery Agent | Primary Convenience Agent(s) | Explicit Summary | Implicit Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A public pronouncement of “Your CEO has committed treason. Here’s clear proof.” | The public at large | The company at large, or the CEO | “This message has great discovery for the public, but is very inconvenient for the company.” | “This message had high discovery but was highly inconvenient.” |
| Your boss sends you a private message saying, “Your recent project was horrible” | You, in the long-term. This could help you improve. | You, in the short-term. This message might cause some panic.This might also be inconvenient for your boss, as it might make you dislike them more. | “This message is a great discovery for you, broadly speaking, but will be inconvenient for you in the short term.” | “This message had good discovery but was inconvenient.” |
| A journalist reveals a major public scandal about the Democratic party | The public at large | There are two main agents of interest: Democrats and Republicans | “This reveal is a significant discovery. It’s very convenient for Republicans and very inconvenient for Democrats” |
Communicators typically care a lot about if their messages will be convenient or inconvenient to people with power over them. If you tweet publicly about all of the key flaws of your main friend group, that would probably be bad for you. If you tweet about some key findings that are very inconvenient to a vocal group on Twitter, you might well get attacked for that. If you accuse a public figure of a big scandal, they and their supporters will fight back. On the flip side, if you publicize convenient information about your colleagues, this could give you more in-group status.
Connections
Section titled “Connections”Conflict Vs. Mistake: Conflict cultures value the conveniences of communication much more than the discovery.
Presentation
The last attribute is “presentation”. This isn’t a linear spectrum, but an ample space of options.
- Does it seem like the author is acting in bad faith; i.e. just revealing the criticism to hurt the group?
- Does it seem(to recipients) like the process used to find this criticism was truth-seeking, using the recipient’s standards?
- Did the writer share a similar epistemic and moral background as the readers? If not, can they demonstrate that they understand the readers’ backgrounds well enough to reliably provide useful information to them?
- Does the writer generally seem like a good and reasonable person?
- What other messages is the author delivering, intentionally or unintentionally? These are often things like social alliances and status indicators.
Comments from Nuño Sempere
Section titled “Comments from Nuño Sempere”Restored with permission (Nuño’s comments, with Ozzie’s replies).
Nuño Sempere: Probably good to define this?
On “splitting criticism”:
Nuño Sempere: You are not “splitting criticism”, you are “splitting the qualities of criticism”, or something like that