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hyporational comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 3: Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar? - Less Wrong
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I agree it's an important element, and for some reason I didn't entertain the thought before you made it available. Do you agree that some people don't post here anymore because of the overly critical environment, and that we might have lost important contributors that way?
I agree. That said, established users generally have high status in the community, which can help mitigate this effect. I think that LW being overly critical is more of a problem for newer users, and even then it's important to consider that one man's "overly critical enviroment" might well be another's "high standards of rigor."
It's true that criticism deters new users much more easily than established users, but I think losing established users is orders of magnitude worse than losing new users.
That old familiar post you linked discusses karma, and I think karma has evolved to be something very different from what it was intended to be. Almost nobody has a happy trigger like that. You can't simply dictate what kinds of signals voting is supposed to send because it will acquire new meanings by usage, and stubbornly going against the grain is going to send unintended signals to people.
There's no shortage of internet fora which lack LessWrong's highly critical environment. They also have much less intelligent discussion. I think there is a connection between these two.
The connection is obvious. Now that I've thought about this some more, maybe some good people leaving is an unavoidable side effect. This doesn't mean you shouldn't be tactful with the criticism, unless you want certain people to leave and not change their minds, which might sometimes be an understandable goal too.