Discourse Norms: Justify or Retract Accusations

I don't want this norm to be adopted. Sometimes someone has personal information that someone did something, but doesn't have sufficient evidence to convince others of this. This is very likely when sexual assault happens, for example. It's also common in cases of e.g. abuse by employers toward employees. Also, some judgments of "this thing is bad" are based on intuitive senses (e.g. aesthetics) that, while often truth-tracking, are difficult to explain to those who don't have the same intuitive sense.

In cases like this, it's important for people to be able to state "I have information that leads me to believe X, and my saying this (and giving the details I can) might or might not be sufficient to convince you". Perhaps others will, upon hearing this, have more relevant information to add, eventually creating common knowledge; and they will also likely have more correct beliefs (and be able to make better decisions) in the meantime, before common knowledge is created.

Ben Hoffman has written on problems with holding criticism to a higher standard than praise:

The problem comes when this standard is applied to critics but not to supporters of EA organizations. This is effectively a tax on internal criticism of EA. If you ask that we impose a higher burden on criticism than on praise for you or your organization, you are proposing that we forgo the benefits of an adversarial system, in order to avoid potentially damaging criticism. If we forgo the benefits of an adversarial system, we can only expect to come to the right answers if the parties that are presenting us with information exhibit an exceptionally honest intent to inform.

If you ask people to hold criticism of you to a higher standard than praise, you are either asserting a right to misinform, or implicitly promising to be honest enough that a balanced adversarial system is not necessary. You are promising to be a reliable, objective source of information, not just a clever arguer.

If you're asserting a right to misinform, then it is clear enough why people might not want to trust you.

So, the norm as stated seems more likely to serve the interest of "create a positive impression of what's going on, regardless of what's actually going on" (i.e. wirehead everyone; this is as scary as it sounds!), than the interest of "share information about what is going on in a way that can at some point lead to common knowledge being created, and the problems being solved".

This norm could be workable if you can distinguish sharing the information "I believe this person did this bad thing" from "I accuse this person of doing this bad thing" (with the first being a denotative statement, and the second being a speech act).

If this norm were to be followed, I think it should apply to endorsements / positive statements as well. Unjustified positivity and endorsement is more harmful when criticism is discouraged.

I quite strongly disagree. This will inevitably lead the most competent and busy people to not share their assessments of anything, since they will be met with the expectation of having to justify every assessment in detail, which is simply not workable in terms of time. It also means there is no way for someone to register that they have a bad feeling about something without being able to make it fully explicit. This also runs into problems with secret information, embarrassing information and situations where someone does not feel safe with the current norms of public discourse.

I recognize and agree with the failure modes of default discourse that this is trying to fix, but I don't think this norm as described is a good idea.

Why the asymmetric burden on criticism? Seems like positive claims are more likely to imply demands on others' resources or attention.

I do want to thank for Davis for making this discourse-norm bid explicitly. I think there's a failure mode where people don't notice that they are trying to enforce mutually exclusive norms, and getting frustrated when people seem to be defecting.

(this is neither an endorsement or disendorsement of the norm in question)

in general norms online often trend too much in the direction of low-content mockery rather than reasoned debate.

Do you think this is currently a problem on LessWrong.com? I have a hard time bringing up examples of cases where someone made public online accusations against other people that they weren't willing to justify.

For in-person conversations (I know this was meant as a norm for public discourse): Personally I tend to have a hard time digging into my memories for "data points" when I have a negative or positive impression of some person. It's kind of the same thing with people asking you "What have you been working on the past week?" – I basically never remember anything immediately (even though I do work on stuff). This creates asymmetric incentives where it's easier to make negative judgments seem unjustified or at least costly to bring up, which can contribute to a culture where justified critical opinions almost never reach enough of a consensus to change something. I definitely think there should be norms similar to the one described in the post, but I also think that there are situations (e.g., if a person has a reliable track record or if they promise to write a paragraph with some bullet points later on once they had time to introspect) were the norm should be less strict than "back the judgment up immediately or retract it." And okay, probably one can manage to say a few words even on the spot because introspection is not that slow and opaque, but my point is simply that "This sounds unconvincing" is just as cheap a thing to say as cheap criticism, and the balance should be somewhere in between. So maybe instead of "justify" the norm should say something like "gesture at the type of reasons," and that should be the bare minimum and more transparency is often preferable. (Another point is that introspecting on intuitive judgments helps refine them, so that's something that people should do occasionally even if they aren't being put on the spot to back something up.)

Needless to say, lax norms around this can be terrible in social environments where some people tend to talk too negatively about others and where the charitable voices are less frequent, so I think it's one of those things where the same type of advice can sometimes be really good, and other times can be absolutely terrible.

I would think of this in terms of rights. Who has the right to post a new theory? Who has the right to challenge an existing concept? Who has the right to reply? Who has the right to defence?Who has the right to demand?

Everyone can choose which ones you want to and which ones you don't want to, but it's not possible to bind other people to your preferences against their will.