For Better Commenting, Avoid PONDS

I don’t agree that a one-off or “drive-by” comment is a bad thing. Yes, it might be nice sometimes to have a lengthy discussion, but, you know, this is just a website, commenting is not my job, and people have other shit to do. I’d rather get a single good comment than get nothing at all from a person who has time to write one comment but not time to be on LW every day checking to see if their comment got a response.

I don't comment very much, but read this post and decided to chime in with a few thoughts since I am trying to shift my default from passive interaction or lurking, to active interaction: reading a post, commenting on it, etc. I believe that defaults are very powerful and matter immensely, so I'm changing mine in response to a rapidly changing world and for improvement reasons [? · GW]!

I enjoy meta discussions like these, thanks for opening it up with your post.

Note: I read the above linked Stratechery articles last night and found them quite impactful + thought provoking, I've been wanting to share them. Doing so in the context of this comment might have been a stretch, but "changing defaults" seems relevant both to this post and my comment since the post is asking that readers comment with a certain set of defaults underlying their comment-style / is providing suggested commenting rules.

I think that, ideally, a comment should avoid those 5 failure modes and be written with an eye to "what quality-bar makes sense given my current skill level, time availability, knowledge, and the context". I'll demonstrate what that might look like below.

Suggestions on countering each failure mode and doing the other things I mentioned:

1. Prickly: I agree with your description of this failure mode. If someone wishes to improve their commenting "warmth" and/or avoid prickliness, they might try the following:
   • saying Thank you for writing this
   • saying "I like what you did here" or "This looks like a good effort" prior to "but, I have these specific criticisms."
   • if a post makes you mad and/or you think it is bad, take a moment to think about whether you really want to jump in and respond to it. If you decide to respond to it, then be mindful of the poster's experience level, their background, the inferential distance between you and what the poster wrote, and/or the intent of the poster (if you can't explicitly tell their intent from their post, use your comment to ask them what their intent was). Being kind but firm seems, anecdotally at least, to be a good approach in most cases.
2. Opaque: I agree with what you said about combating this failure mode, and I think it can be combated with varying levels of time and effort investment by someone. Specificity [LW · GW] is great and seems quite powerful, so providing specific examples or sources to support one's statements, presuppositions, assertions, and so on is usually a great way to combat opaqueness. Additionally, I think that being explicit about one's motivations, source and quality of one's evidence, etc. when making an assertion is valuable (I find it helpful to know my own motivations when doing something, and similarly find it helpful to know another person's motivations when they do something). An individual might be specific at different levels relative to their time availability, experience, skill level / expertise, the context, and so on, e.g.:
   • low time availability: "I assert x because it maps well to mine and other's anecdotal experiences, but don't have non-intuitive or non-experiential evidence to support this assertion." (then quickly share at least one personal experience example) Note that one can avoid opaqueness even if the assertion they made is supported by very low epistemic confidence evidence, it's via providing the evidence itself, source of that evidence, and confidence in that evidence whereby one moves from opaque to specific and explicit.
3. Nitpicky: I agree with what you said about this failure mode, and don't have much to add other than: if an individual has trouble combating their own nitpicky-ness I recommend writing out the main points, presuppositions, important assertions, sources of evidence, etc. from a post so that you can view the post's constituent elements. I do this when unpacking complicated posts and it makes evaluating a post much more doable for me, leading to much deeper analysis, counterpoints, rebuttals, suggestions, etc.
   • Trying to comment about the entire gist of a post at once seems quite taxing on the working memory, and I usually can't do that so I have to deconstruct posts into their constituent elements to actively engage with them and think critically about them let alone write good comments in response.
4. Disengaged: Mostly agreed. I will add that it's possible to write a long, detailed comment and still come across as disengaged if one does not ask good questions, explicitly state they are open to further discussion, and so on. I agree with remizidae though and believe that short, drive-by-comments can be engaging, depending on what the commenter says and how they say it: well targeted words stated succinctly can be powerful. Additionally, offering someone encouragement, or saying "Good job", saying "I liked this and want to see more", or some other nice thing in response to a post can be helpful for a poster to receive, especially if they have low confidence, are just getting started, are exploring something new, and/or might brighten their day and make them feel better about posting here on LW.
5. Shallow: I agree, though similar to Disengaged, I think it's possible for long detailed comments to be shallow if the commenter doesn't actually address what is said in the post and instead rambles on about other things. I think shallowness looks like disengagement, just as disengagement may look like shallowness. Are these really two separate things? They can each be found through the presence of one of them and look similar is why I ask.

I definitely demonstrated having decent time availability with this comment, did I sufficiently address the other things I mentioned that comprise the "quality-bar" I asserted?

General question: What are everyone's defaults with regards to commenting here on LessWrong? @AllAmericanBreakfast, what other defaults do you have besides PONDS?

Sort of meta, but... I'm thinking about the use of acronyms in order to get more density into your title.

If you only get about 5 words, but one of those words is PONDS, have you successfully gotten 9 words? Maybe, and it's worth checking. If you can spend one of your words on unfolding complexity, that's great.

But my experience is "not really" – I tend to totally forget acronyms, unless they are hammered into me a lot over time, which requires other infrastructure. And I could go out of my way to set up a spaced-repetition thingy for this particular post, to get it to stick into my head. But, that wouldn't be scalable. I can only space-repeat so many things.

This is not a strong claim that this acronym won't work or that this post isn't useful. (I think this post works sort of as a space-repeat for the collective LW commentariat about "things to keep in mind for commenting", even if people don't end up remembering this particular acronym). But, I dunno, something to keep in mind.

Would you be interested in crossposting this to the EA Forum? I think your points are equally relevant for those discussions, and I'd be interested to see how posters there would react.

As a mod, I could also save you some time by crossposting it under your account. Let me know if that would be helpful!

I would set the bar slightly higher and expect comments to pass at least 3/5 of the 1" off the ground bars.