Thanks so much for this very helpful feedback Elliot. I’m sorry that my carelessness ended up requiring moderator action. I have a few clarifying comments and questions, if you don’t mind.
The original (standalone) post doesn’t exist anymore. I was going to quote this comment that you made:
When I tried to quote it from the original thread it gave me the warning shown here:
This gave me the impression that I shouldn’t quote your comment from the really old post. When I actually copy and pasted the quote into this comment, I didn’t get the warning. But no red circle shows up beside your name. I can’t tell without making the post, but I don’t think someone will be able to click the comment and be linked to the original thread.
(EDIT: no red circle shows up in the post preview, but it does show up in the actual post like a regular quote. Does that mean everyone in the comment chain got notified? Is that a bad thing we should avoid?)
I could have linked the article with the entire comment section, but that also seems like it would be a vague reference. This is the original article:
There are a decent number of comments here and it would be hard to find the specific line I was referencing.
In the future I will quote the comment (which was my initial instinct) and also link the thread, if necessary.
I chose the title “Discussion with helpful anonymous critic” because I wanted to tell readers it was a post about a person who (helpfully) criticized something I wrote. I avoided putting additional information about todo lists and calendars because I didn’t want that to be the focus of the thread. I wanted the focus to be on the critic and their criticism.
I considered putting some of the criticism into the title, but then I realized there were multiple issues brought up. “Criticism of using second person in a post reply” would leave out the issue about whether posts were on/off topic, etc.
Do you think it would have been better to make specific posts with clear titles for each separate issue? I tried to go with a single thread with a more generic title to make the discussion easier to follow.
Another title I considered was “Paths Forward practice with anonymous critic”. I liked this one more, but I realized I didn’t know enough about Paths Forward (and I’m sure it shows).
Would it have been okay if I wrote it this way? (I put it in a block quote for reading clarity)
It’s not clear to me how to determine when a post will take a topic in a “radically different direction”.
For example, I think Elliot’s post was about the benefits of offloading mental work from your mind. And how todo lists are a tool you can use to offload mental work.
I wanted to point out a flaw that I thought I saw in Elliot’s description of todo lists. I tried to provide an alternative to todo lists that addresses that flaw. So that you could achieve more of the benefits that Elliot talked about.
For reference, you can see Elliot’s post and my comment here: Todo Lists Delegate Work Away From Your Conscious Mind
The goal of this comment was only to show my thought process around whether the post was on/off topic. The way I phrased it originally was misleading and vague. It sounded like you didn’t talk at all about time allocation in your post, which wasn’t accurate.
Your post also reads as fairly hostile and tilted
I find this to be a vague criticism. Could you give some examples of hostile quotes? What exactly do you mean by tilted? I associate that term with losing in gambling (or maybe a video game) and then acting irrationally due to your loss.
Here are some examples of what I find to be friendly and polite comments from my post:
Here I apologize for the lack of clarity in my explanation:
Here I ask for advice because I value their opinion, and I don’t want to come across as pushy:
Even in the title of the post I made sure to note the critic was helpful.
I did want to use Paths Forward. But I also didn’t want to have to read a bunch before I could make a reply. I have been criticized in the past for leaving long gaps between my replies.
@anonymous90 would you be interested in practicing Paths Forward with me in this discussion? I think we’re covering a lot of criticisms at once, it might be more helpful to pick one and try to resolve it first?
To me this sounds like I should use block quotes when the text is a paragraph (or longer) and is entirely a quote. Since my quote was just one sentence, would this rule still apply?
Also, I don’t see anything about paragraphs mentioned in the FAQ:
Never misquote anyone. Due to risk of a typo, use copy/paste or the quote button instead of manually typing in quotes (unless it’s from paper or an audio recording, in which case you must state that it’s typed out by hand). Do not present a summary or paraphrase as a quote. There is zero lenience on this. A misquote is never close enough. This rule is enforced in an extremely picky, exacting, pedantic way. Expect moderator action if you violate this rule. You have been warned.
What about other uses of quotation marks, like fictional or hypothetical dialog, grouping words into a phrase, or scare quotes? Make sure they’re labelled or introduced in clear ways. If you use quotation marks and a reasonable reader might think it’s an actual, exact or literal quote, then you’re misquoting. Any ambiguous uses of quotation marks, which could mislead a reasonable person, will be considered misquotes. If there is even one reasonable interpretation where you misquoted, then you’ve broken the rule, regardless of any other interpretations where you didn’t misquote.
I actually thought the ** was part of the template, sorry. I use the post preview every time I post =)
This is the original text from the template (asterisks were replaced with #):
##Do you want unbounded criticism? (A criticism is a reason that an idea decisively fails at a goal. Criticism can be about anything relevant to goal success, including methods, meta, context or tangents. If you think a line of discussion isn’t worth focusing attention on, that is a disagreement with the person who posted it, which can be discussed.)##
I selected all the text after the question mark and deleted it, accidentally deleting the last two asterisks.
Another option for the template could be:
##Do you want unbounded criticism?## (A criticism is a reason that an idea decisively fails at a goal. Criticism can be about anything relevant to goal success, including methods, meta, context or tangents. If you think a line of discussion isn’t worth focusing attention on, that is a disagreement with the person who posted it, which can be discussed.)
I think that would make it easier to notice the asterisks are there for formatting purposes. Also, I find it more readable when all the text in parentheses isn’t bolded:
Do you want unbounded criticism? (A criticism is a reason that an idea decisively fails at a goal. Criticism can be about anything relevant to goal success, including methods, meta, context or tangents. If you think a line of discussion isn’t worth focusing attention on, that is a disagreement with the person who posted it, which can be discussed.)
Thanks again for your feedback. I really appreciate the work and effort you put into providing this forum.