I think I experience silent, contentless net-disagreement as very hard to interface with. It doesn’t specify what’s wrong with my comment, it doesn’t tell me what the disagreer’s crux is, it doesn’t give me any handholds or ways-to-resolve-the-disagreement. It’s just a “you’ve-been-kicked” sign sitting on my comment forever.
Whereas “the consensus of LW users asked to evaluate this comment for truth is that it is more false than true” is at least conveying something interesting. It can tell me to, for instance, go add more sources and argument in defense of my claims.
Yeah, I think this is a problem, but I think contentless net-disapproval is substantially worse than that (at least for me, I can imagine it being worse for some people, but overall expect people to strongly prefer contentless net-disagreement to contentless net-disapproval).
Like, I think one outcome of this voting system change is that some contentless net-disapproval gets transformed into contentless net-disagreement, which I think has a substantially better effect on the discourse (especially if combined with high approval, which I think carves out a real place for people who say lots of stuff that others disagree with, which I think is good).
(Preamble: I am sort of hesitant to go too far in this subthread for fear of pushing your apparent strong reaction further. Would it be appropriate to cool down for a while elsewhere before coming back to this? I hope that’s not too intrusive to say, and I hope my attempt below to figure out what’s happening isn’t too intrusively psychoanalytical.)
I would like to gently suggest that the mental motion of not treating disagreement (even when it’s quite vague) as “being kicked”—and learning to do some combination of regulating that feeling and not associating it to begin with—forms, at least for me, a central part of the practical reason for distinguishing discursive quality from truth in the first place. By contrast, a downvote in the approval sense is meant to (but that doesn’t mean “will consistently be treated as”, of course!) potentially be the social nudge side—the negative-reinforcement “it would have been better if you hadn’t posted that” side.
I was initially confused as well as to how the four-pointed star version you suggested elsewhere would handle this, but combining the two, I think I see a possibility, now. Would it be accurate to say that you have difficulty processing what feels like negative reinforcement on one axis when it is not specifically coupled with either confirmatory negative or relieving positive reinforcement on the other, and that your confusion around the two-axis system involves a certain amount of reflexive “when I see a negative on one axis, I feel compelled to figure out which direction it means on the other axis to determine whether I should feel bad”? Because if so, that makes me wonder how many people do that by default.
I think it’s easy for me to parse approval/disapproval, and it’s easy for me to parse assertions-of-falsehood/assertions-of-truth. I think it’s hard for me to parse something like “agree/disagree” which feels set up to motte-bailey between those.
Okay. I think I understand better now, and especially how this relates to the “trust” you mention elsewhere. In other words, something more like: you think/feel that not locking the definition down far enough will lead to lack of common knowledge on interpretation combined with a more pervasive social need to understand the interpretation to synchronize? Or something like: this will have the same flaws as karma, only people will delude themselves that it doesn’t?
Strange-Loop relevant: this very comment above is one where I went back to “disagree” with myself after Duncan’s reply. What I meant by that is that I originally thought the idea I was stating was likely to be both true and relevant, but now I have changed my mind and think it is not likely to be true, but I don’t think that making the post in the first place was a bad idea with what I knew at the time (and thus I haven’t downvoted myself on the other axis). However, I then remembered that retraction was also an option. I decided to use that too in this case, but I’m not sure that makes full sense here; there’s something about the crossed-out text that gives me a different impression I’m not sure how to unpack right now. Feedback on whether that was a “correct” action or not is welcome.
Disagreement is not necessarily about truth, it’s often about (not) sharing a subjective opinion. In that case resolving it doesn’t make any sense, the things in disagreement can coexist, just as you and the disagreer are different people. The expectation that agreement is (always) about truth is just mistranslation, the meaning is different. Of course falsity/fallaciousness implies disagreement with people who see truth/validity, so it’s some evidence about error if the claims you were making are not subjective (author-referring).
contentless net-disagreement as very hard to interface with
For subjective claims, the alternative to disagreement being comfortable is emotional experience of intolerance, intuitive channeling of conformance-norm-enforcement (whether externally enacted, or self-targeted, or neither).
When the comment is about truth, then agreement/disagreement is automatically about truth. There are comments that are not about truth, being about truth is a special case that shouldn’t be in the general interface, especially if it happens to already be the intended special case of this more general thing I’m pointing at.
I definitely don’t think that “When the comment is about truth, then agreement/disagreement is automatically about truth” is a true statement about humans in general, though it might be aspirationally true of LWers?
I think I experience silent, contentless net-disagreement as very hard to interface with. It doesn’t specify what’s wrong with my comment, it doesn’t tell me what the disagreer’s crux is, it doesn’t give me any handholds or ways-to-resolve-the-disagreement. It’s just a “you’ve-been-kicked” sign sitting on my comment forever.
Whereas “the consensus of LW users asked to evaluate this comment for truth is that it is more false than true” is at least conveying something interesting. It can tell me to, for instance, go add more sources and argument in defense of my claims.
Yeah, I think this is a problem, but I think contentless net-disapproval is substantially worse than that (at least for me, I can imagine it being worse for some people, but overall expect people to strongly prefer contentless net-disagreement to contentless net-disapproval).
Like, I think one outcome of this voting system change is that some contentless net-disapproval gets transformed into contentless net-disagreement, which I think has a substantially better effect on the discourse (especially if combined with high approval, which I think carves out a real place for people who say lots of stuff that others disagree with, which I think is good).
(I added a small edit after the fact that you may not have seen.)
Ah, indeed. Seems like it’s related to a more broader mismatch on agree/disagree vs. true/false that we are discussing in other threads.
(Preamble: I am sort of hesitant to go too far in this subthread for fear of pushing your apparent strong reaction further. Would it be appropriate to cool down for a while elsewhere before coming back to this? I hope that’s not too intrusive to say, and I hope my attempt below to figure out what’s happening isn’t too intrusively psychoanalytical.)
I would like to gently suggest that the mental motion of not treating disagreement (even when it’s quite vague) as “being kicked”—and learning to do some combination of regulating that feeling and not associating it to begin with—forms, at least for me, a central part of the practical reason for distinguishing discursive quality from truth in the first place. By contrast, a downvote in the approval sense is meant to (but that doesn’t mean “will consistently be treated as”, of course!) potentially be the social nudge side—the negative-reinforcement “it would have been better if you hadn’t posted that” side.
I was initially confused as well as to how the four-pointed star version you suggested elsewhere would handle this, but combining the two, I think I see a possibility, now. Would it be accurate to say that you have difficulty processing what feels like negative reinforcement on one axis when it is not specifically coupled with either confirmatory negative or relieving positive reinforcement on the other, and that your confusion around the two-axis system involves a certain amount of reflexive “when I see a negative on one axis, I feel compelled to figure out which direction it means on the other axis to determine whether I should feel bad”? Because if so, that makes me wonder how many people do that by default.
I think it’s easy for me to parse approval/disapproval, and it’s easy for me to parse assertions-of-falsehood/assertions-of-truth. I think it’s hard for me to parse something like “agree/disagree” which feels set up to motte-bailey between those.
Okay. I think I understand better now, and especially how this relates to the “trust” you mention elsewhere. In other words, something more like: you think/feel that not locking the definition down far enough will lead to lack of common knowledge on interpretation combined with a more pervasive social need to understand the interpretation to synchronize? Or something like: this will have the same flaws as karma, only people will delude themselves that it doesn’t?
Yes to both of your summaries, roughly.
Strange-Loop relevant: this very comment above is one where I went back to “disagree” with myself after Duncan’s reply. What I meant by that is that I originally thought the idea I was stating was likely to be both true and relevant, but now I have changed my mind and think it is not likely to be true, but I don’t think that making the post in the first place was a bad idea with what I knew at the time (and thus I haven’t downvoted myself on the other axis). However, I then remembered that retraction was also an option. I decided to use that too in this case, but I’m not sure that makes full sense here; there’s something about the crossed-out text that gives me a different impression I’m not sure how to unpack right now. Feedback on whether that was a “correct” action or not is welcome.
Disagreement is not necessarily about truth, it’s often about (not) sharing a subjective opinion. In that case resolving it doesn’t make any sense, the things in disagreement can coexist, just as you and the disagreer are different people. The expectation that agreement is (always) about truth is just mistranslation, the meaning is different. Of course falsity/fallaciousness implies disagreement with people who see truth/validity, so it’s some evidence about error if the claims you were making are not subjective (author-referring).
For subjective claims, the alternative to disagreement being comfortable is emotional experience of intolerance, intuitive channeling of conformance-norm-enforcement (whether externally enacted, or self-targeted, or neither).
Right. I’m advocating that we do have a symbol for agreement/disagreement about truth, and leave the subjective stuff in the karma score.
When the comment is about truth, then agreement/disagreement is automatically about truth. There are comments that are not about truth, being about truth is a special case that shouldn’t be in the general interface, especially if it happens to already be the intended special case of this more general thing I’m pointing at.
I definitely don’t think that “When the comment is about truth, then agreement/disagreement is automatically about truth” is a true statement about humans in general, though it might be aspirationally true of LWers?
theyhatedhimbecausehetoldthemthetruth.meme