I personally think that the fact that you are allowed to downvote without providing a summary explanation as to why is also a huge issue for the quality of debate on this site, and frankly: deeply antithetic to its proffessed ethics. Either you don’t know exactly why you are downvoting, or your doing it for reasons that you would rather not expand on, or you’re doing but are to lazy to explain why: either case—you’re doing it wrong.
So for instance: if anybody wants to downvote this (I sort of have a feeling that this could well be the case—somehow), please go ahead and do; AND take the minimal pain (not to mention courtesy) of leaving a leaving a brief note as to the reason why.
I reject “too lazy” as a framing here. People have a finite amount of time and energy and if they choose to spend it on something other than explaining their downvotes, that’s not obviously unvirtuous.
(And explaining one’s downvotes is certainly not a minimal cost, especially not if one wants to do it in a way that seems likely to be helpful to anyone. E.g. my downvote reason is sometimes: “this seems confused; this user has often seemed confused in the past, and attempts to deconfuse them have been unsuccessful; I have better things to do than to pin down exactly how they’re confused in this instance”. Would it satisfy you if I just say that?)
Separately, I expect that the ability to downvote cheaply improves quality of discussion on net, though I acknowledge it has costs.
I find it mildly amusing that this comment has probably received more downvotes (gross, not net) than all but a handful of my LW comments, but so far no disagreeing comments.
Like, are these coming from people who broadly agree with me that silent downvoting is an acceptable thing to do, but nonetheless think it was a bad comment? I’d be fascinated to hear why!
(Other guesses that I have include: “it’s funny to silently downvote this specific comment” (I agree it’s not 0% funny); “you should see how it feels” (eh, maybe so; though this is not a cost I was previously blind to, also it’s less painful here than it has been on other comments); “silent downvoting should not be an option but since it is I’m not going to unilaterally disarm”; “you spoke in favor of something I dislike so I’m going to downvote”; “that specific reason is a bad reason to downvote silently”.)
Part of the value of reddit-style votes as a community moderation feature is that using them is easy. Beware Trivial Inconveniences and all that. I think that having to explain every downvote would lead to me contributing to community moderation efforts less, would lead to dogpiling on people who already have far more refutation than they deserve, would lead to zero-effort ‘just so I can downvote this’ drive-by comments, and generally would make it far easier for absolute nonsense to go unchallenged.
If I came across obvious bot-spam in the middle of the comments, neither downvoted nor deleted and I couldn’t downvote without writing a comment… I expect that 80% of the time I’d just close the tab (and that remaining 20% is only because I have a social media addiction problem).
I’ve said this many times but downvotes are a valuable signal that wastes way less time of everyone involved.
Explanations of downvotes don’t just take the time of the person writing them, they also take the time of everyone else who has to read them, and multiply the impact of trolls and prolific bullshitters.
If you are getting a lot of downvotes, then it’s almost always for a good reason and rarely that mysterious, and if you pay attention you will soon figure out what people don’t like about your content, for example that it’s whiny.
A large point of voting is to direct attention. One of many reasons I don’t think negative votes need to be explained is that writing a comment, even a negative comment, calls attention to what I’m commenting on, which is usually the opposite of my goal in downvoting.
Humm I see… not sure if it totally serves the purpose though. For instance, when I see a comment with a large number of downvotes, I’m much more likely to read it than a comment with a relatively now number of upvotes. So: within certain bounds, I guess.
I see. But how can the poster learn if he doesn’t know where it has gone wrong? To give one concrete example: in a comment recently, I simply stated that some people hold that AI could be a solution to the Fermi paradox (past a certain level of collective smartness an AI is created that destroys its creators). I got a few downvotes on that—and frankly I am puzzled as to why and I would really be curious to understand the reasonings between the downvotes. Did the downvoters hold that the Fermi paradox is not really a thing? Did they think that it is a thing but that AI can’t be a solution to it for some obvious reason? Was it something else—I simply don’t know; and so I can’t learn.
Guillaume I think you’re imagining a world where we end up with all downvotes coming with nice explanations. But the actual world I think we’ll get is fewer downvotes, which means more bad content on the site, which makes the site reading and writing experience worse. (See Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options, as well as Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism)
I think it’s good to have more explanations for downvotes all else being equal, but people are busy and it’s not actually tractable as an overall norm.
Similarly to what is mentioned in the Duncan_Sabien text above, that bad commenting culture ruins old-timers and newcomers alike, down-voting also doesn’t seem to work as intended.
”What happens instead, in practice, is evaporative cooling, as the most sensitive or least-bought-in of [the authors/builders who made your subculture worth participating in in the first place] give up and go elsewhere, marginally increasing the ratio of critics to makers, which makes things marginally less rewarding, which sends the next bunch of builders packing, which worsens the problem further.”
And to use your examples with the garden, if the fool is given the tool and power to down-vote and comment, doesn’t that endanger bad content/bad culture just as much as not hindering the ‘fool’ from writing on the front page?
In the post above, the point I see is that building and giving feedback is mutually dependent. In other words, it is much better for both of them if their relationship is acknowledged. Writing good posts is hard, and takes effort and dedication. Giving relevant and good feedback is also hard, and it takes effort and dedication. Since they are dependent of each other, it would be fair if both of them had to abide by the same levels of standards, and to also get similar levels of acclaim and prestige.
Going down the same level of thinking, if someone should have something like a blanket power of actively hiding new posts/comments in the way of “down-voting”, as a kind of sub-moderator power, that would make sense to me if they themselves are reliable, trustworthy, skillful and discerning. I wouldn’t mind if being down-voted/hidden showed my ‘skill bar’ regarding if my post/comment didn’t meet certain standards. And, unless there were enough people with this skill set around, I would be understanding if I didn’t get an explanation. But, I would assume that the person down-voting/hiding my post/comment themselves abided by the same rules and could explain their reasoning if prompted.
But is every down/up voter sufficiently skilled, discerning and trustworthy? Is there any bar they have to cross to wield this power?
Under this post alone, there are a lot of votes, as well as different comments. Let’s contrast two of them, the first being the introductory comment to this discussion, by Guillaume Charrier. It has gotten 7 down-votes. And this one (below) by cousin_it, which has gotten 18 up-votes. I’ll look at them using the Front page comment guidelines.
1. Aim to explain, not persuade. 2. Try to offer concrete models and predictions. 3. If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking. 4. Don’t be afraid to say ‘oops’ and change your mind
cousin_it, ”I don’t see any group of people on LW running around criticizing every new idea. Most criticism on LW is civil, and most of it is helpful at least in part. And the small proportion that isn’t helpful at all, is still useful to me as a test: can I stop myself from overreacting to it?”
Charrier: 1. Tries mostly to persuade, but also explains. 2. Offers predictability in behavior, and a certain code of conduct. 3. Doesn’t disagree with Poster, but doesn’t acknowledge him/her directly. 4. Interacts with commentors, and seems open to change his/her mind if given a valid explanation.
cousin_it: 1. Both. 2. Uses a model to fully refute the post. 3. Disagrees, dismisses the poster’s points entirely, and doesn’t acknowledge him/her. 4. Did not interact or comment further, despite getting a couple of comments. No mention of any openness to ‘oops’ or changing his/her mind.
I’m not going to read too much into it, but which of them are following the guidelines more? And not only the guidelines, but I assume the intentions of them? And still, cousin_it has 18 up-votes, and Charrier has 7 down-votes. How is that possible?
Since Posts and Comments are mutually dependent, both should be held accountable, managed and rewarded. To keep the garden well-kept, we not only need censure—we need discernment. If we have discernment, it is prudent to go much further in censure.
I see Charrier’s comment, Duncan_Sabien’s post and my own comment as pointing at a Major problem. And this comment is hopefully one contribution towards solving it.
If we can’t trust the enforcers, what are the guidelines even worth? I would like stricter enforcing, so that good is promoted and validated, and better is even more supported, whereas needs-work gets feedback, and dubious and bad is simply hidden (You can always do what cousin_it says and work on reading the hidden stuff just to challenge yourself, but it should be optional).
But is every down/up voter sufficiently skilled, discerning and trustworthy? Is there any bar they have to cross to wield this power?
LW has tried to solve this with weighted voting power, and that has made a difference; I think vote totals here are meaningfully better than on Reddit, for instance.
But there are just so many people with vote strength 1 or 2 or 3, and it’s very easy for a popular (but really bad by the standards of rationality) comment to drown out an actually good one.
I’m not one of the downvoters, but to hazard a guess, if something like a paperclip maximizer were to have killed off a nearby alien civilization, where are all the paperclips?
Exactly—and then we can have an interesting conversation etc. (e.g. are all ASIs necessarily paperclip maximizers?), which the silent downvote does not allow for.
You are given millions of words of context and examples to learn from.
One of the things to learn is that a few downvotes is basically meaningless, because lots of people disagree in lots of ways and you need to stop caring that much.
But how can the poster learn if he doesn’t know where it has gone wrong?
That is the poster’s problem.
When I think that a poster is wrong or clueless about something, and that I have good reasons for thinking so that i can articulate, then I may write something. But often, especially when I click on a post standing at −20 just out of morbid curiosity, I find something deep into not-even-wrong territory and happily add my silent strong downvote.
Exactly! I have tried to convey to this community various of my rationally-arrived-at beliefs, but have been shut down without a fair hearing whenever I begin explaining how all computers are secretly run by squirrels on treadmills inside them. This is an extremely important fact to this community’s purported goals of AI alignment and safety—how are you supposed to train an AI without acorns? Yet rather than engage with me and explain why they disagree with my Strategic Dog Reserve concept for safety against malign AI, they simply silently downvote my posts, either through being too lazy to engage with them, or through being in the pocket of Big Squirrel! This needs to change if this site is to live up to its professed ethics and cultivate high-quality debate.
I personally think that the fact that you are allowed to downvote without providing a summary explanation as to why is also a huge issue for the quality of debate on this site, and frankly: deeply antithetic to its proffessed ethics. Either you don’t know exactly why you are downvoting, or your doing it for reasons that you would rather not expand on, or you’re doing but are to lazy to explain why: either case—you’re doing it wrong.
So for instance: if anybody wants to downvote this (I sort of have a feeling that this could well be the case—somehow), please go ahead and do; AND take the minimal pain (not to mention courtesy) of leaving a leaving a brief note as to the reason why.
I reject “too lazy” as a framing here. People have a finite amount of time and energy and if they choose to spend it on something other than explaining their downvotes, that’s not obviously unvirtuous.
(And explaining one’s downvotes is certainly not a minimal cost, especially not if one wants to do it in a way that seems likely to be helpful to anyone. E.g. my downvote reason is sometimes: “this seems confused; this user has often seemed confused in the past, and attempts to deconfuse them have been unsuccessful; I have better things to do than to pin down exactly how they’re confused in this instance”. Would it satisfy you if I just say that?)
Separately, I expect that the ability to downvote cheaply improves quality of discussion on net, though I acknowledge it has costs.
I find it mildly amusing that this comment has probably received more downvotes (gross, not net) than all but a handful of my LW comments, but so far no disagreeing comments.
Like, are these coming from people who broadly agree with me that silent downvoting is an acceptable thing to do, but nonetheless think it was a bad comment? I’d be fascinated to hear why!
(Other guesses that I have include: “it’s funny to silently downvote this specific comment” (I agree it’s not 0% funny); “you should see how it feels” (eh, maybe so; though this is not a cost I was previously blind to, also it’s less painful here than it has been on other comments); “silent downvoting should not be an option but since it is I’m not going to unilaterally disarm”; “you spoke in favor of something I dislike so I’m going to downvote”; “that specific reason is a bad reason to downvote silently”.)
He he… what do they call it again? Ah: cosmic justice. However, on net, you’re still doing oretty well. So.
Part of the value of reddit-style votes as a community moderation feature is that using them is easy. Beware Trivial Inconveniences and all that. I think that having to explain every downvote would lead to me contributing to community moderation efforts less, would lead to dogpiling on people who already have far more refutation than they deserve, would lead to zero-effort ‘just so I can downvote this’ drive-by comments, and generally would make it far easier for absolute nonsense to go unchallenged.
If I came across obvious bot-spam in the middle of the comments, neither downvoted nor deleted and I couldn’t downvote without writing a comment… I expect that 80% of the time I’d just close the tab (and that remaining 20% is only because I have a social media addiction problem).
I’ve said this many times but downvotes are a valuable signal that wastes way less time of everyone involved.
Explanations of downvotes don’t just take the time of the person writing them, they also take the time of everyone else who has to read them, and multiply the impact of trolls and prolific bullshitters.
If you are getting a lot of downvotes, then it’s almost always for a good reason and rarely that mysterious, and if you pay attention you will soon figure out what people don’t like about your content, for example that it’s whiny.
A large point of voting is to direct attention. One of many reasons I don’t think negative votes need to be explained is that writing a comment, even a negative comment, calls attention to what I’m commenting on, which is usually the opposite of my goal in downvoting.
Humm I see… not sure if it totally serves the purpose though. For instance, when I see a comment with a large number of downvotes, I’m much more likely to read it than a comment with a relatively now number of upvotes. So: within certain bounds, I guess.
It is the poster’s job to learn,
It is not my job to teach.
I see. But how can the poster learn if he doesn’t know where it has gone wrong? To give one concrete example: in a comment recently, I simply stated that some people hold that AI could be a solution to the Fermi paradox (past a certain level of collective smartness an AI is created that destroys its creators). I got a few downvotes on that—and frankly I am puzzled as to why and I would really be curious to understand the reasonings between the downvotes. Did the downvoters hold that the Fermi paradox is not really a thing? Did they think that it is a thing but that AI can’t be a solution to it for some obvious reason? Was it something else—I simply don’t know; and so I can’t learn.
Guillaume I think you’re imagining a world where we end up with all downvotes coming with nice explanations. But the actual world I think we’ll get is fewer downvotes, which means more bad content on the site, which makes the site reading and writing experience worse. (See Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options, as well as Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism)
I think it’s good to have more explanations for downvotes all else being equal, but people are busy and it’s not actually tractable as an overall norm.
Hello Raemon and Guillaume Charrier,
Similarly to what is mentioned in the Duncan_Sabien text above, that bad commenting culture ruins old-timers and newcomers alike, down-voting also doesn’t seem to work as intended.
”What happens instead, in practice, is evaporative cooling, as the most sensitive or least-bought-in of [the authors/builders who made your subculture worth participating in in the first place] give up and go elsewhere, marginally increasing the ratio of critics to makers, which makes things marginally less rewarding, which sends the next bunch of builders packing, which worsens the problem further.”
And to use your examples with the garden, if the fool is given the tool and power to down-vote and comment, doesn’t that endanger bad content/bad culture just as much as not hindering the ‘fool’ from writing on the front page?
In the post above, the point I see is that building and giving feedback is mutually dependent. In other words, it is much better for both of them if their relationship is acknowledged. Writing good posts is hard, and takes effort and dedication. Giving relevant and good feedback is also hard, and it takes effort and dedication. Since they are dependent of each other, it would be fair if both of them had to abide by the same levels of standards, and to also get similar levels of acclaim and prestige.
Going down the same level of thinking, if someone should have something like a blanket power of actively hiding new posts/comments in the way of “down-voting”, as a kind of sub-moderator power, that would make sense to me if they themselves are reliable, trustworthy, skillful and discerning. I wouldn’t mind if being down-voted/hidden showed my ‘skill bar’ regarding if my post/comment didn’t meet certain standards. And, unless there were enough people with this skill set around, I would be understanding if I didn’t get an explanation. But, I would assume that the person down-voting/hiding my post/comment themselves abided by the same rules and could explain their reasoning if prompted.
But is every down/up voter sufficiently skilled, discerning and trustworthy? Is there any bar they have to cross to wield this power?
Under this post alone, there are a lot of votes, as well as different comments. Let’s contrast two of them, the first being the introductory comment to this discussion, by Guillaume Charrier. It has gotten 7 down-votes. And this one (below) by cousin_it, which has gotten 18 up-votes. I’ll look at them using the Front page comment guidelines.
1. Aim to explain, not persuade.
2. Try to offer concrete models and predictions.
3. If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking.
4. Don’t be afraid to say ‘oops’ and change your mind
cousin_it,
”I don’t see any group of people on LW running around criticizing every new idea. Most criticism on LW is civil, and most of it is helpful at least in part. And the small proportion that isn’t helpful at all, is still useful to me as a test: can I stop myself from overreacting to it?”
Charrier:
1. Tries mostly to persuade, but also explains.
2. Offers predictability in behavior, and a certain code of conduct.
3. Doesn’t disagree with Poster, but doesn’t acknowledge him/her directly.
4. Interacts with commentors, and seems open to change his/her mind if given a valid explanation.
cousin_it:
1. Both.
2. Uses a model to fully refute the post.
3. Disagrees, dismisses the poster’s points entirely, and doesn’t acknowledge him/her.
4. Did not interact or comment further, despite getting a couple of comments. No mention of any openness to ‘oops’ or changing his/her mind.
I’m not going to read too much into it, but which of them are following the guidelines more? And not only the guidelines, but I assume the intentions of them? And still, cousin_it has 18 up-votes, and Charrier has 7 down-votes. How is that possible?
Since Posts and Comments are mutually dependent, both should be held accountable, managed and rewarded. To keep the garden well-kept, we not only need censure—we need discernment. If we have discernment, it is prudent to go much further in censure.
I see Charrier’s comment, Duncan_Sabien’s post and my own comment as pointing at a Major problem. And this comment is hopefully one contribution towards solving it.
If we can’t trust the enforcers, what are the guidelines even worth? I would like stricter enforcing, so that good is promoted and validated, and better is even more supported, whereas needs-work gets feedback, and dubious and bad is simply hidden (You can always do what cousin_it says and work on reading the hidden stuff just to challenge yourself, but it should be optional).
Sincerely,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Strong upvote, strong agree. In particular:
LW has tried to solve this with weighted voting power, and that has made a difference; I think vote totals here are meaningfully better than on Reddit, for instance.
But there are just so many people with vote strength 1 or 2 or 3, and it’s very easy for a popular (but really bad by the standards of rationality) comment to drown out an actually good one.
I’m not one of the downvoters, but to hazard a guess, if something like a paperclip maximizer were to have killed off a nearby alien civilization, where are all the paperclips?
Exactly—and then we can have an interesting conversation etc. (e.g. are all ASIs necessarily paperclip maximizers?), which the silent downvote does not allow for.
You are given millions of words of context and examples to learn from.
One of the things to learn is that a few downvotes is basically meaningless, because lots of people disagree in lots of ways and you need to stop caring that much.
That is the poster’s problem.
When I think that a poster is wrong or clueless about something, and that I have good reasons for thinking so that i can articulate, then I may write something. But often, especially when I click on a post standing at −20 just out of morbid curiosity, I find something deep into not-even-wrong territory and happily add my silent strong downvote.
Exactly! I have tried to convey to this community various of my rationally-arrived-at beliefs, but have been shut down without a fair hearing whenever I begin explaining how all computers are secretly run by squirrels on treadmills inside them. This is an extremely important fact to this community’s purported goals of AI alignment and safety—how are you supposed to train an AI without acorns? Yet rather than engage with me and explain why they disagree with my Strategic Dog Reserve concept for safety against malign AI, they simply silently downvote my posts, either through being too lazy to engage with them, or through being in the pocket of Big Squirrel! This needs to change if this site is to live up to its professed ethics and cultivate high-quality debate.
I laughed. However you must admit that your comical exaggeration does not necessarily carry a lot of ad rem value.