Blog comments
Comments can hurt, but they're also gold, because unlike friends who proofread you, they're not too worried about offending you.
The idea of sitting down and finding the One Eternal Truth about anything is a fantasy. The universe has fractal levels of detail in every direction. There are a lot of ridiculously smart and well-informed people out there, and some of them will have deeper knowledge and insight about basically every facet of every thought you ever have. If you can motivate the collective hivemind to pay attention to something you care about, you’d be crazy not to listen.
– www.greaterwrong.com/posts/8mjoPYdeESB7ZcZvB/observations-about-writing-and-commenting-on-the-internet
That said, you don't need to engage with every commenter. Remember that while they will point out everything bad in your writing, they can still be pleasant about it. Those who don't start out pleasantly are likely to never give you the closure of a resolved thread. The people who will pleasantly engage with you clearly signal their intention to be pleasant.
The tricky situation is cases where someone is mildly (or un-mildly) rude but also makes an intriguing point. After many failures, my policy is now to take their comments into account as much as I can and maybe reply with “thanks for your input”, but not to engage or ask follow-up questions.
Or where applicable, say "fixed, thank you", or even "sorry, I phrased it badly" – but you don't need to invite further replies.
A point against epistemic legibility:
Technically, the complaints were wrong. How could I “fix” the problem of not citing any papers when I had already cited dozens? That’s what I thought for months, during which people continued to read the post and have the same damned reaction. Eventually, I had to confront that even if they were “wrong”, something about my post was causing them to be wrong. Viewed that way, the problem was obvious: The idea that a humidifier could be bad for you is weird and disturbing, and weird and disturbing things are usually wrong so people are skeptical and tend to find ways to dismiss them.
Should they do that?
[Insert long boring polemic on Bayesian rationality]
It’s debatable—but it’s a fact that they do it. So I rewrote the post to be “gentle”. Previously my approach was to sort of tackle the reader and scream “HUMIDIFIERS → PARTICLES! [citation] [citation] [citation] [citation]” and “PARTICLES → DEATH! [citation] [citation] [citation]”. I changed it to start by conceding that ultrasonic humidifiers don’t always make particles and it’s not certain those particular particles cause harm, et cetera, but PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH PAPERS says these things are possible, so it’s worth thinking about.
After making those changes, no one had the same reaction anymore.
Part of me feels like this is wrong, that it’s disingenuous to tune writing to make people have the reaction you want them to have. After all, I could be wrong, in which case it’s better if my wrongness is more obvious.
If you repeatedly hear the same complaint, you can presume there is a problem, though it might be very different from the problem people state.