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I think the best answer to both @Ben___Garrison and @Frequent_Anybody2984 below is found in this recent NYT article:
New Normal or No Normal? How Economists Got It Wrong for 3 Years.
We can go back and forth one whether the underlying datasets were right or wrong all along, whether the forecast models were accruate within an exceptable margin, and how far out, whether your own prediction or post-hoc interpretation is vindicated.
But the fact is that the 'experts' in their communication, reporting, framing, advisement, and forecasting were wrong. It is plain, and clear and widely known. To disagree, is to disagree with the experts on what the experts believed.
To express confoundedness at this trickling down into people updating priors against experts' guidance or to make silly analogies that this is just 'vibes' from out-of-step, misunderstood lived experiences, is incorrect.
And to alternatively admit, that 'yes, yes experts were wrong for the past 3 years, especially in what they communicated to the public, and in ways very obviously and coincidentally partisan, but please believe the current diagonsis of the economy right now because it's what the expert data tells us', well sure, I'm listening, but you need to do better than make insulting hokey analogies about lived experience or tell me that your Muslim friend is smart, but jihadistic so, I should just listen to the experts now.
This is the third top level comment in a row on the same topic. Not everyone wants to discuss this topic, it is generally a courtesy to keep a single topic of discussion to a single top level thread. If a current news event topic is way too large (like the Ukraine war, or the Israel-gaza war) then we will try and create a separate thread dedicated just to that topic.
@iprayiam3 and @Frequent_Anybody2984 please try and follow this courtesy for others users.
Sorry! I initially had a much better comment that would have been top level worthy imo but it got deleted by a cat. I should have posted that one as a response.
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Understood, but meta food for thought:
To the extreme effect, Ben's own post was a response to a thread from last week. He, correctly I imagine, top-leveled it here instead of responding there because that CWR post was effectively dead. The same effect works at a micro scale on top levels within a post. I don't have a suggestion for how to fix, but I'd be interested if anyone else notices it worse than it used to be?
Perhaps, I've just gotten used to DSL's forum style of functionally bumping discussions with the newest comment to the top. Perhaps some of it the (contentious) hiding of thumbs up for so long, but it ends up feeling like posting anything 'down thread' feels like shouting into the void.
Okay, Ben's top level response was to his own post that was a day old. I feel I need to clear that up so as not to present it as being somehow more acceptable than yours or frequent_anybody's.
But, to me, top level responses don't just dilute things to being a single topic that other people might not be interested in but generally feel rude or at the very least represent an etiquette faux pas that can cause unnecessary social strife. The implication being something along the lines of "your response was so bad I need to make another topic just to deal with it." or "I'm so right and you're so wrong that I'm taking this to a top level comment to give my argument that much more value."
Whether or not that's right, I see it that way sometimes, and I can imagine others do as well, and there's no way that's not going to ruffle other people who aren't bypassing the usual method of just responding to someone below their comment.
That's all fair. I can accept that this shouldn't have been a top level.
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But you both basically caused the original thread to fall further. Id get it more if there were like five other posts that buried the original discussion, but there aren't.
The sort by new means that your post would have been second if you had both just posted in the original topic. Does being the second post from the top really make you feel like a thread is buried?
And there is a slippery slope problem here. If you two do it, what if everyone that responds to you also just chooses to post at the top level? The threading becomes a useless feature. Your thread gets buried even faster than normal, and no one is happy.
Three posts on one topic isn't bad for readability, but breaking a suggested rule twice in a row is bad for the legibility of suggested rules. I specifically do not want people to see these two courtesy violations and think "ah I should do that too".
There is nothing wrong with reviving a dead topic from last week.
Fair enough
I didn't mean to suggest there is
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