I thought of this Mitchell Porter post on MWI and this puzzle post by Thomas. As it happens, I downvoted both (though after a while, I dropped the downvote from the latter) and would defend those downvotes, but I can see how prase gets the impression that we only upvote articles on a narrow subset of topics.
As for physics, I was thinking more about this whose negative karma I have already commented on. In the meantime I have forgotten that the post managed to return to zero afterwards.
“Low-quality” is too general a justification to recognise the detailed reasons of downvotes. Among the more concrete criticisms I recall many “this is off-topic, hence my voting down” reactions. My memories may be subject to bias, of course, and I don’t want to spend time making a more reliable statistics. What I am feeling more certain about is, however, that there are many people who wish to keep all debates relevant to rationality, which effectively denotes an accidental set of topics, roughly {AI, charity donations, meta-ethics, evolution psychology, self-improvement, cognitive biases, Bayesian probability}. No doubt those topics are interesting, even for me. But not so much to keep me engaged after three (or how much exactly) years of LW’s existence. And since I disagree with many standard LW memes, I suppose there may be other potential “contrarians” (perhaps more willing to voice their disagreements than I am) becoming slowly disinterested for reasons similar to mine.
As for physics, I was thinking more about this whose negative karma I have already commented on. In the meantime I have forgotten that the post managed to return to zero afterwards.
Yes, it’s sitting at +1 here and sitting at +2 at physics stackexchange. This supports the opposite of your view, suggesting that physics questions are almost as on-topic here as they are at physics stackexchange—which is surely too on-topic.
I thought of this Mitchell Porter post on MWI and this puzzle post by Thomas. As it happens, I downvoted both (though after a while, I dropped the downvote from the latter) and would defend those downvotes, but I can see how prase gets the impression that we only upvote articles on a narrow subset of topics.
Wow. The first one is only at −2? That’s troubling. Ahh, nevermind.
I thought of this Mitchell Porter post on MWI and this puzzle post by Thomas. As it happens, I downvoted both (though after a while, I dropped the downvote from the latter) and would defend those downvotes, but I can see how prase gets the impression that we only upvote articles on a narrow subset of topics.
Yeah, both of those are low-quality.
As for physics, I was thinking more about this whose negative karma I have already commented on. In the meantime I have forgotten that the post managed to return to zero afterwards.
“Low-quality” is too general a justification to recognise the detailed reasons of downvotes. Among the more concrete criticisms I recall many “this is off-topic, hence my voting down” reactions. My memories may be subject to bias, of course, and I don’t want to spend time making a more reliable statistics. What I am feeling more certain about is, however, that there are many people who wish to keep all debates relevant to rationality, which effectively denotes an accidental set of topics, roughly {AI, charity donations, meta-ethics, evolution psychology, self-improvement, cognitive biases, Bayesian probability}. No doubt those topics are interesting, even for me. But not so much to keep me engaged after three (or how much exactly) years of LW’s existence. And since I disagree with many standard LW memes, I suppose there may be other potential “contrarians” (perhaps more willing to voice their disagreements than I am) becoming slowly disinterested for reasons similar to mine.
Yes, it’s sitting at +1 here and sitting at +2 at physics stackexchange. This supports the opposite of your view, suggesting that physics questions are almost as on-topic here as they are at physics stackexchange—which is surely too on-topic.
Wow. The first one is only at −2? That’s troubling. Ahh, nevermind.