EA - We're losing creators due to our nitpicking culture by TheAthenians

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: We're losing creators due to our nitpicking culture, published by TheAthenians on April 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a cross-post from LessWrong, originally titled "Killing Socrates" by Duncan Sabien. Cross-posted with his permission.This is posted from an anonymous account of somebody who has been on the Forum for over 7 years and has over 2500 karma who's more or less stopped posting on the EA Forum and LessWrong for exactly the reasons he describes.This is not an isolated case. Here are a couple examples to illustrate this, and some memes that have been floating around EA Twitter that seem to be resonating. The first two examples are for LessWrong but just as easily could have been for the EA Forum, which has a similar culture.^Source^SourceFunnily enough, one of the top comments on the post at the time of publishing was somebody debating the correct pluralisation of "Socrates".And remember that for every one famous case of somebody leaving because of it, there will probably be tens to >100 people who leave without saying anything.This is an important problem, and I don't know the solution, but I hope it is discussed and addressed.Or, On The Willful Destruction Of Gardens Of Collaborative InquiryOne of the more interesting dynamics of the past eight-or-so years has been watching a bunch of the people who [taught me my values] and [served as my early role models] and [were presented to me as paragons of cultural virtue] going off the deep end.Those people believed a bunch of stuff, and they injected a bunch of that stuff into me, in the early days of my life when I absorbed it uncritically, and as they've turned out to be wrong and misguided and confused in two or three dozen ways, I've found myself wondering what else they were wrong about.One of the things that I absorbed via osmosis and never questioned (until recently) was the Hero Myth of Socrates, who boldly stood up against the tyrannical, dogmatic power structure and was unjustly murdered for it. I've spent most of my life knowing that Socrates obviously got a raw deal, just like I spent most of my life knowing thatIt now seems quite plausible to me that Socrates was, in fact, correctly responded-to by the Athenians of his time, and that the mythologized version of his story I grew up with belongs in the same category as Washington's cherry tree or Pocahontas's enthusiastic embrace of the white settlers of Virginia.The following borrows generously from, and is essentially an embellishment of, this comment by @Vaniver.Imagine that you are an ancient Athenian, responsible for some important institution, and that you have a strong belief that the overall survival of your society is contingent on a reliable, common-knowledge buy-in of Athenian institutions generally, i.e. that your society cannot function unless its members believe that it does function.This would not be a ridiculous belief! We have seen, in the modern era, how quickly things go south when faith in a bank (or in the financial system as a whole) evaporates. We know what happens when people stop believing that the police or the courts are on their side. Regimes (or entire nations) fall when their constituents stop propping up the myth of those regimes. Much of civilization is shared participation in self-fulfilling prophecies like "this little scrap of green paper holds value."And if you buy"My society's survival depends upon people's faith in its institutions."...then it's only a small step from there to something like:"My society's survival depends upon a status-allocation structure whereby [the people who pour their time and effort into building things larger than themselves] receive lots of credit and reward, and [the people who contribute little, and sit back idly criticizing] receive correspondingly l...