anonym comments on Open Thread: September 2009 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: AllanCrossman 01 September 2009 10:54AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 11 September 2009 08:11:30PM *  0 points [-]

Several times recently I asked for simple clarifications about a comment that replied to something I wrote, and had my question ignored. (See here, here, and here.) And I don't know why. Did I violate some rule of etiquette, or what? How can I rephrase my questions to get a better response rate?

ETA: Here are the questions, in case people don't want to search through the comments to find them:

  • But I'm not sure what you mean by "metaethics, a solved problem". Can you give a link?
  • What prior work are you referring to, that hasn't been broadly disseminated?
  • What is the remaining Problem that you're referring to?
Comment author: anonym 12 September 2009 06:47:12PM 0 points [-]

I think in cases like these, you're more likely to get a response by adding another post as a reply to the person with just a single unanswered question (start with the one you care about most), so the person will see they have a new response in their inbox and realize they never answered an earlier question. If you post each of those 3 questions as a response to the person, in context, I'd be very surprised if you didn't get a response to at least 2 of the 3, as long as you include little to nothing else in each post so it's obvious what you're asking for and they can't respond to something else in the post.

I've noticed that longish posts with multiple questions often get just one question answered and all the others ignored, intentionally or unintentionally. And posts that are longish with questions interspersed with non-questions tend to get responded too as if the non-questions were the substantive part, with the questions often ignored.

(The other extremely common reason for not getting a response is identifying a flaw or asking a question that shows problems with the person's position, in which case most people seem to just ignore the post rather than admit they were wrong or can't answer a critique. I don't think that's the case here at all though.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 13 September 2009 01:38:43AM 1 point [-]

This seems like good advice. I did think about repeating the unanswered question, but was worried that I'd come off as obnoxious if the commenter was avoiding it deliberately for some reason. Given the multiple confirmations that that's probably not the case, I think I'll do so more often in the future. Thanks.