Jonathan_Graehl comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong
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Comments (161)
When read in context, Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech explains why criticism without suggestion is useless and deserving of dismissal.
Even though I disagree with your conclusions, I'm glad you wrote this post because the reasoning that went into it is a common failure mode of the "cowering from life" bloc of LessWrong. Encouraging naked dissent without trying to improving things is applause lights for the most cynical, life-disengaged readers who would rather have a satisfying intellectual contempt for others than try and actually solve real problems.
It may be worth knowing how to insult your critics along these lines (in case you have to persuade a bunch of simpletons to hate or ignore them), but that was rather a lot of words to say "many of my critics have no practical experience and so have useless, untested beliefs, which really annoys me."
If anything I'm too charitable in my reading; he didn't bother to explain why a critic with little personal experience attempting what he critiques is unfit.
Lack of suggestions signals a lack of engagement with the implementation of ideas in the space a critic is discussing which signals a lack of correct understanding.
People who only think about ideas but do not try to carry out any plans related to them lack the required knowledge to actually understand problems so their criticisms are systematically over-simplified, brittle, and worthy of, if not outright dismissal, at least severe discounting.
Also, criticism costs critics (almost) nothing and is enjoyable on a basic human level to the critics, so there's good reason to expect heavy criticism of all ideas... including correct ones.