Nobody responds to Zora’s comment, but it gets heavily downvoted, so much so that she becomes rate-limited from commenting on the EA Forum. Eventually, her comment gets deleted and she gets banned from commenting on that author’s forum posts ever again. In private, the author accuses of her of being rude, obnoxious, and preachy and of thereby alienating potential cis allies.
Assuming such a comment was written in a neutral or collaborative tone, I wouldn’t expect it to be downvoted. Possibly ignored, but not downvoted (of course, I’m giving some credit here that the EA forum follows LW norms, which I know it doesn’t, so maybe it’s got more folks who would downvote to just say boo trans people?). Lacking an example, this premise doesn’t seem very believable to me, even though I do believe this kind of thing would be likely to happen elsewhere on the internet.
This is subtweeting the fact that (iirc) the OP wrote a comment sort of similar to the one described, on Duncan’s most recent post. I think it is much less surprising that such a comment got downvoted on LW (vs. the EA forum), and am not at all surprised that Duncan then deleted the comment and banned the OP from comment on their posts, after the comment spawned a (probably-annoying-to-Duncan) longer comment thread.
Yeah, this is definitely a minimally-obfuscated autobiographical account, not hypothetical. It’s also false; there were lots of replies. Albeit mostly after Yarrow had already escalated (by posting about it on Dank EA Memes).
There were comments on Facebook, to be sure, but I never saw anyone (except me) reply to my comment here on LessWrong, ever after (what felt like) several days.
For anyone curious, you can view the original comment here.
Thanks. I wish you would have just directly made this post about this specific thing that happened rather than try to generalize from one example. Or found more examples to show a pattern we could engage with. Now my read on your post is you just wanted to vent, which seems fine but I don’t really want to read that in a LessWrong post. Seems better for Twitter or short form.
Also your example in this post is different than the thing that actually happened, though similar I guess?
I also don’t totally understand why your comment was downvoted. Lacking context it seems like it was likely just irrelevant to the discussion, but then I would have expected most people to just ignore it. But then again people get pretty annoyed with language policing, especially when there’s not serious confusion about what’s being discussed or clear harms being caused (here the harm, as explained, seems indirect and speculative).
I wish you would have just directly made this post about this specific thing that happened rather than try to generalize from one example. Or found more examples to show a pattern we could engage with.
There are so, so many examples of things like this that happen all the time in the world. I used two hypothetical examples in the post. I thought that would suffice.
Assuming such a comment was written in a neutral or collaborative tone, I wouldn’t expect it to be downvoted. Possibly ignored, but not downvoted (of course, I’m giving some credit here that the EA forum follows LW norms, which I know it doesn’t, so maybe it’s got more folks who would downvote to just say boo trans people?). Lacking an example, this premise doesn’t seem very believable to me, even though I do believe this kind of thing would be likely to happen elsewhere on the internet.
This is subtweeting the fact that (iirc) the OP wrote a comment sort of similar to the one described, on Duncan’s most recent post. I think it is much less surprising that such a comment got downvoted on LW (vs. the EA forum), and am not at all surprised that Duncan then deleted the comment and banned the OP from comment on their posts, after the comment spawned a (probably-annoying-to-Duncan) longer comment thread.
Yeah, this is definitely a minimally-obfuscated autobiographical account, not hypothetical. It’s also false; there were lots of replies. Albeit mostly after Yarrow had already escalated (by posting about it on Dank EA Memes).
There were comments on Facebook, to be sure, but I never saw anyone (except me) reply to my comment here on LessWrong, ever after (what felt like) several days.
For anyone curious, you can view the original comment here.
Thanks. I wish you would have just directly made this post about this specific thing that happened rather than try to generalize from one example. Or found more examples to show a pattern we could engage with. Now my read on your post is you just wanted to vent, which seems fine but I don’t really want to read that in a LessWrong post. Seems better for Twitter or short form.
Also your example in this post is different than the thing that actually happened, though similar I guess?
I also don’t totally understand why your comment was downvoted. Lacking context it seems like it was likely just irrelevant to the discussion, but then I would have expected most people to just ignore it. But then again people get pretty annoyed with language policing, especially when there’s not serious confusion about what’s being discussed or clear harms being caused (here the harm, as explained, seems indirect and speculative).
There are so, so many examples of things like this that happen all the time in the world. I used two hypothetical examples in the post. I thought that would suffice.
You might be surprised!