There are certain questions that have several possible answers, where people decide that a certain answer is obviously true and have trouble seeing the appeal of the other answers. If everyone settles on the same answer, all is well. If different people arrive at different answers and each believes that his answer is the obvious one, then the stage is set for a flame war. When you think the other guy’s position is obviously false, it’s that much harder to take him seriously.
We don’t have flame wars of the calling-each-other-names kind, because of norms that say that if you see a comment with the substring “you’re an idiot” outside of quotation, you downvote it regardless of anything else. (Or at least this is my strategy. If the comment is otherwise brilliant, I retract the downvote instead of upvoting, but this doesn’t happen.)
We do still have discussions about politics in which everyone says unproductive and/or stupid things. At the very least, all the stupidest comments that I’ve made on LW have been related to politics. And I’d go back and apologize for them if other people involved in the discussion weren’t so obviously wrong.
I was being figurative. I meant to imply that when two people both think the other person is obviously wrong, then productive, civil discourse is unlikely.
The short time I’ve been on LW I noticed that the community is very much averse to actual flame wars and would probably down-vote a thread into oblivion before things got out of hand.
In recent months there were a few comments with flame-war potential which were quickly “downvoted into oblivion”, but the next day their karma was above zero.
Either it means we have a group of people who prevent their “side” from being downvoted below zero (although they don’t bother to upvote it highly when it already is above zero), or we have a group of people who believe in something like “no comment should be downvoted just because it has a flame-war potential” who prevent downvoting below zero in principle regardless of the side. I don’t know which one of these options it is, since all comments where I have seen this happen were from one “side” (maybe even from one user, I am not sure).
There are certain questions that have several possible answers, where people decide that a certain answer is obviously true and have trouble seeing the appeal of the other answers. If everyone settles on the same answer, all is well. If different people arrive at different answers and each believes that his answer is the obvious one, then the stage is set for a flame war. When you think the other guy’s position is obviously false, it’s that much harder to take him seriously.
How much flame wars do you see on LW, when we do discuss politics?
I don’t see that as a major problem.
We don’t have flame wars of the calling-each-other-names kind, because of norms that say that if you see a comment with the substring “you’re an idiot” outside of quotation, you downvote it regardless of anything else. (Or at least this is my strategy. If the comment is otherwise brilliant, I retract the downvote instead of upvoting, but this doesn’t happen.)
We do still have discussions about politics in which everyone says unproductive and/or stupid things. At the very least, all the stupidest comments that I’ve made on LW have been related to politics. And I’d go back and apologize for them if other people involved in the discussion weren’t so obviously wrong.
Yes. That very much in line with the position I argue in this thread. Epictetus on the other hand did argue that flame wars are an issue.
I was being figurative. I meant to imply that when two people both think the other person is obviously wrong, then productive, civil discourse is unlikely.
The short time I’ve been on LW I noticed that the community is very much averse to actual flame wars and would probably down-vote a thread into oblivion before things got out of hand.
In recent months there were a few comments with flame-war potential which were quickly “downvoted into oblivion”, but the next day their karma was above zero.
Either it means we have a group of people who prevent their “side” from being downvoted below zero (although they don’t bother to upvote it highly when it already is above zero), or we have a group of people who believe in something like “no comment should be downvoted just because it has a flame-war potential” who prevent downvoting below zero in principle regardless of the side. I don’t know which one of these options it is, since all comments where I have seen this happen were from one “side” (maybe even from one user, I am not sure).
No, all seems well. Except people develop massive over-confidence in that answer.