I think this post is pointing at an important consideration, but I want to flag it doesn't acknowledge or address my own primary cruxes, which focus on "what social patterns generate, in humans, the most intellectual progress over time." This feels related to Vaniver's comment.
One sub-crux is "people don't get sick of you and stop talking to you" (or, people get sick of a given discussion area being drama-prone)
Another sub-crux is "phrasing things in a triggery-way makes people feel less safe (and then less willing to open up and share vulnerable information), and also makes people more fight-minded and think less rationaly (i.e. less able to process information correctly).
My overall claim is that thick skin, social courage(and/or obliviousness), and tact are all epistemic virtues.
I see you arguing for thick skin and social courage/obliviousness and I agree, but your arguments prove too much and don't seem to engage at all with the actual social question of how to build a truthseeking institution and don't seem to explore much where tact is actually important.
To be clear: I think it's an important virtue to cultivate thick skin, and the ability to hear unpleasant feedback without developing an ugh field or becoming irrational. And it's important to have the social courage to say unpleasant things that disrupt the social harmony.
But it's strictly better to be able to convey those things without triggering people, making people annoyed enough that they leave, or putting them into a political frame where they are more trying to defeat your argument than focus on truthfinding. I think the amount of expectations an intellectual community should have that people are capable of doing that isn't zero.
I don't think it's overwhelmingly obvious where that non-zero bar for tact should be, exactly. I definitely think the tact bar is lower than I might have naively guessed 4 years ago. I'm guessing your don't mean to literally argue it should be zero, and I read you more as arguing that the value of thick skin and willingness-to-disrupt-the-social-harmony is nonzero, rather than arguing it's literally infinite.
But, like, I agree with that, I think most people around here agree with that, and the question is the actually complex question of how these things interact and how to prioritize them given limited resources (as well as how much to focus on this whole overall question as opposed to other things that lend themselves less self-reinforcing-internet-arguments)
I think it's a good exercise, for people arguing things like "taxes should be higher, or lower", to be able to answer the question "how would you know if it were too high or too low?", and that's the sort of thing I'd find actually persuasive here.
It feels important and telling that if it wasn't a day-job that I was paid for to think about posts like this, I would not be motivated to engage very deeply here. My past experience is you're kinda ideological about this, such responding to individual arguments here doesn't seem particularly worthwhile. My sense is that you'll keep generating reasons for not having to learn tact no matter what I say, and meanwhile it's not very fun and I don't think this is actually near the top of the list of things I could focus on to increase the rate of intellectual progress on LessWrong (which looks less like engaging in internet arguments and more like doing some of the less exciting parts of research and engineering).
(and notably, I almost left off the last paragraph because it seemed to push the comment in a more political-fight-y direction that was likely to result in a) the conversation being a bit more polarized, b) more likely to lead to me unendorsedly spending time on this that I'd rather spend on some more systematic improvements to the site. I ended up deciding to include it, and this meta-commentary, which I'm not sure whether was the right call)
A good culture is somewhere in between, but closer to A than B. Forum B encourages people to equivocate and utter half-truths and forget what it means to tell the truth or to lie. Much better to have confrontations, edit older comments when you've changed your mind, and have your faced rubbed into your current internal contradictions; then you will at least notice them, and that's the necessary prerequisite to correcting them, or if you won't/can't, observing they make you unreliable at reasoning in whatever matter presents itself.
Someone once told me that they thought I acted like refusing to employ the bare minimum of social grace was a virtue, and that this was bad. (I'm paraphrasing; they actually used a different word that starts with b.)
I definitely don't want to say that lack of social grace is unambiguously a virtue. Humans are social animals, so the set of human virtues is almost certainly going to involve doing social things gracefully!
Nevertheless, I will bite the bullet on a weaker claim. Politeness is, to a large extent, about concealing or obfuscating information that someone would prefer not to be revealed—that's why we recognize the difference between one's honest opinion, and what one says when one is "just being polite." Idealized honest Bayesian reasoners would not have social graces—and therefore, humans trying to imitate idealized honest Bayesian reasoners will tend to bump up against (or smash right through) the bare minimum of social grace. In this sense, we might say that the lack of social grace is an "epistemic" virtue—even if it's probably not great for normal humans trying to live normal human lives.
Let me illustrate what I mean with one fictional and one real-life example.
The beginning of the film The Invention of Lying (before the eponymous invention of lying) depicts an alternate world in which everyone is radically honest—not just in the narrow sense of not lying, but more broadly saying exactly what's on their mind, without thought of concealment.
In one scene, our everyman protagonist is on a date at a restaurant with an attractive woman.
"I'm very embarrassed I work here," says the waiter. "And you're very pretty," he tells the woman. "That only makes this worse."
"Your sister?" the waiter then asks our protagonist.
"No," says our everyman.
"Daughter?"
"No."
"She's way out of your league."
"... thank you."
The woman's cell phone rings. She explains that it's her mother, probably calling to check on the date.
"Hello?" she answers the phone—still at the table, with our protagonist hearing every word. "Yes, I'm with him right now. ... No, not very attractive. ... No, doesn't make much money. It's alright, though, seems nice, kind of funny. ... A bit fat. ... Has a funny little—snub nose, kind of like a frog in the—facial ... No, I won't be sleeping with him tonight. ... No, probably not even a kiss. ... Okay, you too, 'bye."
The scene is funny because of how it violates the expected social conventions of our own world. In our world, politeness demands that you not say negative-valence things about someone in front of them, because people don't like hearing negative-valence things about themselves. Someone in our world who behaved like the woman in this scene—calling someone ugly and poor and fat right in front of them—could only be acting out of deliberate cruelty.
But the people in the movie aren't like us. Having taken the call, why should she speak any differently just because the man she was talking about could hear? Why would he object? To a decision-theoretic agent, the value of information is always nonnegative. Given that his date thought he was unattractive, how could it be worse for him to know rather than not-know?
For humans from our world, these questions do have answers—complicated answers having to do with things like map–territory confusions that make receiving bad news seem like a bad event (rather than the good event of learning information about how things were already bad, whether or not you knew it), and how it's advantageous for others to have positive-valence false beliefs about oneself.
The world of The Invention of Lying is simpler, clearer, easier to navigate than our world. There, you don't have to worry whether people don't like you and are planning to harm your interests. They'll tell you.
In "Los Alamos From Below", physicist Richard Feynman's account of his work on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, Feynman recalls being sought out by a much more senior physicist specifically for his lack of social graces:
Someone who felt uncomfortable with Feynman's bluntness and wanted to believe that there's no conflict between rationality and social graces might argue that Feynman's "simple proposition" is actually wrong insofar as it fails to appreciate the map–territory distinction: in saying, "No, it's not going to work", was not Feynman implicitly asserting that just because he couldn't see a way to make it work, it simply couldn't? And in general, shouldn't you know who you're talking to? Wasn't Bohr, the Nobel prize winner, more likely to be right than Feynman, the fresh young Ph.D. (at the time)?
While not entirely without merit (it's true that the map is not the territory; it's true that authority is not without evidential weight), attending overmuch to such nuances distracts from worrying about the physics, which is what Bohr wanted out of Feynman—and, incidentally, what I want out of my readers. I would not expect readers to confirm interpretations with me before publishing a critique. If the post looks lousy, say it looks lousy. If it looks good, say it looks good. Simple proposition.