I know that I’ll probably be downvoted again, but nevertheless.
Which in practice, makes a really huge difference in how much rationalists can relax when they are around fellow rationalists. It’s the difference between having to carefully tiptoe through a minefield and being free to run and dance, knowing that even if you make a mistake, it won’t socially kill you.
Sorry, but I don’t feel that I have this freedom on LW. And I feel people moralize here especially using the downvote function.
So when just asking the most basic rationality question(why do you believe what you believe) and presenting evidence that contradicts a point is downvoted I don’t feel that LW is about rationality as much as others like to believe. And I also feel that basic elements of politeness are missing and yes, I feel like I have to walk on eggs.
A point about counteracting evidence: if I believe I have a weighted six sided die that yields a roll of “one” one out of every ten rolls rather than one out of every six rolls as a fair die would, a single roll yielding a “one” is evidence against my theory. In a trial in which I repeatedly roll the die, I should expect to see many rolls of “one”, even though each “one” is more likely under the theory the die is fair than it is under the theory the die is weighted against rolls of “one”.
You really didn’t present evidence that contradicted anything, the most this sort of testimony could be is as you said, “evidence to the contrary”, but not as you also said, “contradicts”. One thing to look out for is idiosyncratic word usage. Apparently, I interpret the word “contradict” to be much stronger than you do. It would be great to find out how others interpret it, there are all sorts of possibilities.
When I consider whether or not the things I am directed to are good evidence of a conspiracy behind the destruction of the World Trade Center, I discount apparent evidence indicating a conspiracy against what I would expect to see if there were no actual conspiracy.
As an analogy: if I hear a music album and find 75% of the songs are about troubled relationships or love, I don’t conclude the songwriter’s life is or was particularly troubled, because that’s what gets sung about by people of somewhat normal background, even though much of their lives are spent sleeping, eating, standing in line, etc. Only when every song sounds like the same complaint do I conclude something is uniquely wrong with them. This is somewhat counterintuitive, one might have thought 75% love/troubled songs indicated unique problems, but its not so.
Similarly, the conspiracy stuff surrounding the Twin Towers has been underwhelming to me. What I see is exactly what I would expect were the towers collapsed by Al-Quaeda hijacked planes. This absolutely includes what you presented, an interview after the fact by someone saying that in the confusion he heard sounds that sounded like explosions beneath him. Seeing this evidence is like rolling a “one” or hearing a love song on an album: totally expected according to the theories that the die lands on “one” 10% of the time, that the singer is normal, or that the towers were brought down by the planes.
Discounting evidence is dangerous considering we are all biased and if you dismiss any evidence to the contrary you have to answer: what evidence would be strong enough to change your mind?
But my problem is not with people discounting evidence(everyone is free to close their eyes) but outright downvoting evidence that goes against their beliefs is social punishment.
There was a time, many years ago, when I paid close attention to the arguments of the “truthers”, and came to the conclusion that they were wrong. What you’re doing now is bringing up the same old arguments with no obviously new evidence. I’m not going to give you my full attention, not because I want to close my eyes to the truth, but because I already looked at the evidence and already, in Bayesian terminology, updated my priors. Revisiting old evidence and arguments as if they were fresh evidence would arguably be an irrational thing for me to do, because it would be treating one piece of evidence as if it were two, updating twice on the same, rehashed, points that I’ve already considered.
I did not downvote you, because I have a soft spot for that sort of thing, but if other people have already, long ago, considered the best arguments and evidence, then at this point you really are wasting their time. It’s not that they’re rejecting evidence, I suspect, but that they’re rejecting having their time being taken up with old evidence that they’ve already taken into account.
if you dismiss any evidence to the contrary you have to answer: what evidence would be strong enough to change your mind?
As a separate point, I have always argued against the validity of a certain argument against theists, that they are obligated to say what would constitute evidence sufficient to change their minds. The demand is an argument from ignorance. Nonetheless, being able to articulate what sufficiently contradictory evidence would be is a point in an arguers favor, even though the inability to do so is not fatal.
In this case, I’d say the question is somewhat ill-formed for two reasons. First, many entirely different things would be sufficient evidence to get me to change my mind, but if other things were also the case, they would no longer be sufficient. Certain statements by the CIA might be sufficient, but not if there were also other statements from the FBI.
Second, there are many sorts of mind changing possible. The more sane conspiracy theorists simply say the official account is not credible. The others articulate theories that, even granting all of there premises, are still less likely than the official story. A related point is what it means to be wrong according to different logics. If I believe in Coca-Cola’s version of Santa Claus and also believe that Kobe Bryant is left-handed, in one sense there is no “Kobe Bryant” in the same way that there is no “Santa Claus”. In a more useful sense, we say “Kobe Bryant really exists, but is right handed, and Santa Claus does not exist.” This is so even though there is no one thing preventing us from saying “Santa Claus is really young, not old, tall and thin, not fat, has no beard and shaves his head, is black, and not white, and plays shooting guard for the Lakers under the alias “Kobe Bryant”, and does nothing unusual on Christmas.” Whether you say things I learn falsify the official story or modify it is a matter of semantics, but certain elements-like the involvement of Al-Quaeda-are more central to it than others. These elements are better established by existing evidence and would take correspondingly more evidence to dislodge.
So the answer to “what evidence would be strong enough to change your mind?” varies a lot depending on exactly what is being asked.
But my problem is not with people discounting evidence(everyone is free to close their eyes) but outright downvoting evidence that goes against their beliefs is social punishment.
I think it is notable and important that the different but similar things you said got different responses. One was downvoted unto automatic hiding (the threshold is set to hide at −3 or less (more negative) by default). One was downvoted much more. We can speculate as to why but its important to acknowledge different community responses to different behavior (I won’t prejudge it by saying “Different going against social beliefs”).
Onto speculation: one problem with the video as evidence for explosions was a certain kind of jumping to conclusions. The guy said he heard explosions, but this is skipping a step. I could just as well say I heard people in a box, when I had actually heard sound waves emitted by a speaker attached to a computer. The guy’s insistence that explosions were causing the sound is very strange, even granted that he had heard explosions before and the sounds he heard may have sounded exactly like those. Likewise for his claim they were coming from beneath him, considering what was going on.
Similarly, your assumption about the reason for your downvotes is certainly skipping steps. Most noticeable is how you don’t distinguish what you are being socially punished for among your several downvoted posts, but the response to them was so different.
It’s not so simple as that you were “go[ing] against their beliefs”. Not everyone uses the voting function identically, but assuming many others use it as I do I can offer an analysis. I use it to push things to where I think they should be, rather than as an expression that I was glad I read a post (in hopes others will do the same, such that votes reflect what individuals were glad to have read. I believe something like this was the intent of the system’s creators). I see −4 and −15 as not inappropriate final marks for your posts, and so didn’t weigh in on them through the voting mechanism.
The problem with your first post was that it unfairly pushed the work of argument onto Eliezer. This is the same problem with the poll sent out by the fundamentalists to philosophers a few months ago, I couldn’t find it, but it included questions such as “Do you agree: life begins at conception?” and “Do you agree: humans are unique and unlike the other animals?” The problem with that question is that the work/number of words needed to adequately disentangle and answer that exceed those required to ask it. Your question also didn’t start from anywhere, you would have gotten a better response if you had said you thought the beliefs either actually right or wrong but not insane.
The tl;dr is that it was a passive-aggressive question. A small sin, for which it gets a −4, as implicitly the one voicing it disagrees with it and is against the communal norm, how important that factor is, I can’t know.
The video evidence was a larger sin, as it was basically a waste of time to listen to it. First, the guy emphasized that he certainly heard explosions beneath him, as if by disbelieving that one would be thinking him to be a liar. Like I said above, this is the same thing ghost observers do: I don’t necessarily disbelieve you heard what you heard and saw what you saw, I just am unsure about the original cause of that noise, especially considering how humans hear what they hear based on what they are familiar with hearing and expecting to hear (the multiple-drafts model of cognition).
What’s more, when the advocate of a position has an opportunity to direct someone to evidence supporting his or her position and must elect to give them one piece of evidence in an attempt to spread the belief, I expect them to go with their best argument, which in turn ought to sound pretty impressive, as even incorrect positions often have one compelling argument in their favor.
If I had come across the video you showed as the first video I saw in the course of randomly watching accounts of 9/11 survivors (if a random sample of survivors were filmed and archived), it would be maybe perhaps be somewhat suspicious. As a video cherry picked by someone trying to justify skepticism, it’s catastrophically weak, shockingly so actually. I expect cherry picked evidence in favor of any conspiracy to at least induce a physiological response, e.g. OMG bush has reptilian eyes he is a reptile he is a lizard person, oh wait that’s stupid, it’s an artifact of light being shined on dozens of presidents millions of times and this video has been cherry-picked.
I know that I’ll probably be downvoted again, but nevertheless.
This is precisely the wrong way to start off a post like this, a very passive-aggressive tone.
Sorry, but I don’t feel that I have this freedom on LW. And I feel people
moralize here especially using the downvote function.
Are you certain that it isn’t simply the tone of your posts?
So when just asking the most basic rationality question
(why do you believe what you believe) and presenting evidence that
contradicts a point is downvoted I don’t feel that LW is about rationality
as much as others like to believe. And I also feel that basic elements
of politeness are missing and yes, I feel like I have to walk on eggs.
Also bitterness. I think that you would benefit a lot by rephrasing your questions in a less confrontational manner.
Eliezer, could you explain how you arrived at the conclusion that this particular believe is visibly insane?
could have become
Eliezer, I don’t understand how you arrived at this conclusion, could you explain the reasoning behind it?
Soften up your posts.
I never downvote, as I think it’s counterproductive. Others don’t agree, but that is their right. Taking it personally is not the right approach.
I would welcome factual criticisms of my posts instead of just attacking the “tone” you read in them.
Right, the posts could be softened up, but isn’t it funny that you don’t direct the same criticism to the ones who called a certain point of view insane? How confrontational is that?
I’m limited in my scope, I’m not going to follow links and criticize every single post. I happened to be reading yours, and thought that I might be able to help you with tone… others are probably better at dealing with actual content. If you would prefer me to not try to help you, let me know and I’ll focus my efforts elsewhere.
I upvoted your comment prospectively. That is, it’ll be worth an upvote when you edit out the passive aggressive intro and I’m being optimistic. :)
Sorry, but I don’t feel that I have this freedom on LW. And I feel people moralize here especially using the downvote function.
We do. Not all the downvoting is moralizing but a significant subset is. And not all the moralizing is undesirable to me, even though a significant subset is.
For what it is worth, believing the WTC was loaded with explosives really is insane.
Labeling these as 1-5 from top to bottom, 2 contributes to 1 (you may be double-penalizing if you’re counting them distinctly), and 4 (time cost to investigate) doesn’t seem like a valid reason to discount a hypothesis.
I don’t know whether I disagree with your conclusion—I haven’t bothered to read arguments about the topic and probably will continue to not do so because the expected value of such data is of pretty low for me—I just wanted to point out possible errors in your process.
2 contributes to 1, yes, but conspiracy hypotheses are flawed for reasons other than their complexity.
I agree with you on 4: it isn’t a reason to discount the hypothesis, but it is a reason to avoid seeking further information on the topic (high opportunity cost).
On reflection, I now regret engaging on this topic. My apologies for time wasted.
On reflection, I now regret engaging on this topic. My apologies for time wasted.
Please don’t. Your comment was an example that it is possible to reply politely and rationally even in a discussion on topic that you (presumably) consider irrational. That is a nice skill to have.
Not always. Time-consuming investigations have a disutility value - if the prior for theories in this reference class multiplied by the utility of finding this idea to be true does not overcome that disutility, you ought not investigate. That is a very serious reason to reject an idea. If you do not give some weight to time costs of investigation, I have a reductio ad absurdum here that will monopolise your free time forever.
That’s true. But that’s a reason to not investigate and not read this thread and not think about the subject at all, not a reason to reply in this thread that the idea is unlikely, much less to declare it unlikely.
If your reaction to reading about the truther idea is “the value of knowing the facts about this issue, whatever they are, is rather low, and it would be time consuming to learn them, so I don’t care” that is A-OK. If your reaction is “the value of knowing the facts about this issue, whatever they are, is rather low, and it would be time consuming to learn them, therefore I am not going to update whatsoever on this issue and will ignore the evidence I know is available and yet still have a strong, high-confidence belief on it” then that seems kind of silly to me.
Does that make sense? Do you agree, or not? This is not an issue I feel very strongly about, but value of information is something I’ve been thinking about more recently and so I think that hearing others’ opinions on it would be useful. At the very least, worth the time to read them :) Amusing link, by the way.
That’s true. But that’s a reason to not investigate and not read this thread and not think about the subject at all, not a reason to reply in this thread that the idea is unlikely, much less to declare it unlikely.
If it’s a priori deemed unlikely, deciding not to investigate will lead to it staying this way, and one could as well express this state of knowledge in posting to the thread.
Years ago, I formulated the “No Bullet Hypothesis” of the Kennedy assassination: he wasn’t hit by any bullets at all, his head just blew up. I had been thinking it was a peculiar form of spontaneous human combustion, perhaps involving Marilyn Monroe and Tibetan Nazis, but now I realize that his head must have been full of nano-thermite, possibly inserted during a trip to the presidential dentist.
I’m not sure that heavy sarcasm like this is constructive. While I thought it was funny, I think it encourages the audience to automatically disregard and deride the subject. In my experience, heavy sarcasm tends to both make the subject angry and reinforce the subject’s (erroneous?) beliefs.
My own sarcastic responses (about political or otherwise weighty matters) typically just polarize the group I’m in, making the new in-group like me and the new out-group dislike me.
This comment is awesome, and I’d like to think that if I believed the twin towers were destroyed by demolitions set off by the government I would still upvote it.
And I feel people moralize here especially using the downvote function.
Do you think that people use the downvote to tell another user that they are a terrible person… or do they simply use it to express disagreement with a statement?
I think probably both happen, but it’s tilted heavily toward the latter. Feel free to downvote if you disagree. :)
Do you think that people use the downvote to tell another user that they are a terrible person… or do they simply use it to express disagreement with a statement?
There’s another possibility. I downvote when I felt that reading the post was a waste of my time and I also believe it wasted most other people’s time.
(This isn’t a veiled statement about Roland. I do not recall voting on any of his posts before.)
The problem with the downvote is that it mixes the messages “I don’t agree” with “I don’t think others should see this”. There is no way to say “I don’t agree, but that post was worth thinking about”, is there? Short of posting a comment of your own, that is.
That’s exactly what I do. I try to downvote comments based on how they’re written (if they’re rude or don’t make sense, I downvote them) instead of what they’re written about. (Though I may upvote comments based on agreeing with the content.)
That’s exactly what I do. I try to downvote comments based on how they’re written (if they’re rude or don’t make sense, I downvote them) instead of what they’re written about. (Though I may upvote comments based on agreeing with the content.)
That’s exactly what I do too. (Although my downvote threshold is likely a tad more sensitive. :P)
I think there is a positive outcome from the system as it is, at least for sufficiently optimistic people. The feature is that it should be obvious that downvoting is mixed with those and other things, which helps me not take anything personally.
Downvotes could be anything, and individuals have different criteria for voting, and as I am inclined to take things personally, this obviousness helps me. If I knew 50% of downvotes meant “I think the speaker is a bad person”, every downvote might make me feel bad. As downvotes currently could mean so many things, I am able to shrug them off. They could currently mean: the speaker is bad, the comment is bad, I disagree with the comment, I expect better from this speaker, it’s not fair/useful for this comment to be voted so highly rated compared to a similar adjacent comment that I would rather people read instead/I would like to promote as the communal norm, etc.
If one has an outlook that is pessimistic in a particular way, any mixing of single messages to multiple meanings will cause one to overly react as if the worst meaning is intended by a message, and this sort of person would be most helped by ensuring each message has only one meaning.
Are there lots of other topics you feel this way about?
If it’s just this topic, that doesn’t seem like a very big deal to me. I have no doubt LW has at least a few topics where people have an unproductive moralizing response. However, if such toxicity uncommon and doesn’t affect important topics then I don’t think it’s a very big deal (though certainly worth avoiding).
If I didn’t already know it’d been downvoted into the asthenosphere, I would have downvoted it. But as it stands now, there’s no reason for me to downvote it, because it’s already been downvoted enough.
If I didn’t already know it’d been downvoted into the asthenosphere, I would have downvoted it. But as it stands now, there’s no reason for me to downvote it, because it’s already been downvoted enough.
I understood the message. But the latin phase was off. Ceteris paribus is the one that would fit.
I know that I’ll probably be downvoted again, but nevertheless.
Sorry, but I don’t feel that I have this freedom on LW. And I feel people moralize here especially using the downvote function.
To give a concrete example of Eliezer himself
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/
I politely asked for clarification only to be not only ignored but also downvoted to −4:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1t7r
On another comment I presented evidence to the contrary(a video interview) to be downvoted to −15: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1r5v
So when just asking the most basic rationality question(why do you believe what you believe) and presenting evidence that contradicts a point is downvoted I don’t feel that LW is about rationality as much as others like to believe. And I also feel that basic elements of politeness are missing and yes, I feel like I have to walk on eggs.
A point about counteracting evidence: if I believe I have a weighted six sided die that yields a roll of “one” one out of every ten rolls rather than one out of every six rolls as a fair die would, a single roll yielding a “one” is evidence against my theory. In a trial in which I repeatedly roll the die, I should expect to see many rolls of “one”, even though each “one” is more likely under the theory the die is fair than it is under the theory the die is weighted against rolls of “one”.
You really didn’t present evidence that contradicted anything, the most this sort of testimony could be is as you said, “evidence to the contrary”, but not as you also said, “contradicts”. One thing to look out for is idiosyncratic word usage. Apparently, I interpret the word “contradict” to be much stronger than you do. It would be great to find out how others interpret it, there are all sorts of possibilities.
When I consider whether or not the things I am directed to are good evidence of a conspiracy behind the destruction of the World Trade Center, I discount apparent evidence indicating a conspiracy against what I would expect to see if there were no actual conspiracy.
As an analogy: if I hear a music album and find 75% of the songs are about troubled relationships or love, I don’t conclude the songwriter’s life is or was particularly troubled, because that’s what gets sung about by people of somewhat normal background, even though much of their lives are spent sleeping, eating, standing in line, etc. Only when every song sounds like the same complaint do I conclude something is uniquely wrong with them. This is somewhat counterintuitive, one might have thought 75% love/troubled songs indicated unique problems, but its not so.
Similarly, the conspiracy stuff surrounding the Twin Towers has been underwhelming to me. What I see is exactly what I would expect were the towers collapsed by Al-Quaeda hijacked planes. This absolutely includes what you presented, an interview after the fact by someone saying that in the confusion he heard sounds that sounded like explosions beneath him. Seeing this evidence is like rolling a “one” or hearing a love song on an album: totally expected according to the theories that the die lands on “one” 10% of the time, that the singer is normal, or that the towers were brought down by the planes.
I concede the point about language.
Discounting evidence is dangerous considering we are all biased and if you dismiss any evidence to the contrary you have to answer: what evidence would be strong enough to change your mind?
But my problem is not with people discounting evidence(everyone is free to close their eyes) but outright downvoting evidence that goes against their beliefs is social punishment.
There was a time, many years ago, when I paid close attention to the arguments of the “truthers”, and came to the conclusion that they were wrong. What you’re doing now is bringing up the same old arguments with no obviously new evidence. I’m not going to give you my full attention, not because I want to close my eyes to the truth, but because I already looked at the evidence and already, in Bayesian terminology, updated my priors. Revisiting old evidence and arguments as if they were fresh evidence would arguably be an irrational thing for me to do, because it would be treating one piece of evidence as if it were two, updating twice on the same, rehashed, points that I’ve already considered.
I did not downvote you, because I have a soft spot for that sort of thing, but if other people have already, long ago, considered the best arguments and evidence, then at this point you really are wasting their time. It’s not that they’re rejecting evidence, I suspect, but that they’re rejecting having their time being taken up with old evidence that they’ve already taken into account.
As a separate point, I have always argued against the validity of a certain argument against theists, that they are obligated to say what would constitute evidence sufficient to change their minds. The demand is an argument from ignorance. Nonetheless, being able to articulate what sufficiently contradictory evidence would be is a point in an arguers favor, even though the inability to do so is not fatal.
In this case, I’d say the question is somewhat ill-formed for two reasons. First, many entirely different things would be sufficient evidence to get me to change my mind, but if other things were also the case, they would no longer be sufficient. Certain statements by the CIA might be sufficient, but not if there were also other statements from the FBI.
Second, there are many sorts of mind changing possible. The more sane conspiracy theorists simply say the official account is not credible. The others articulate theories that, even granting all of there premises, are still less likely than the official story. A related point is what it means to be wrong according to different logics. If I believe in Coca-Cola’s version of Santa Claus and also believe that Kobe Bryant is left-handed, in one sense there is no “Kobe Bryant” in the same way that there is no “Santa Claus”. In a more useful sense, we say “Kobe Bryant really exists, but is right handed, and Santa Claus does not exist.” This is so even though there is no one thing preventing us from saying “Santa Claus is really young, not old, tall and thin, not fat, has no beard and shaves his head, is black, and not white, and plays shooting guard for the Lakers under the alias “Kobe Bryant”, and does nothing unusual on Christmas.” Whether you say things I learn falsify the official story or modify it is a matter of semantics, but certain elements-like the involvement of Al-Quaeda-are more central to it than others. These elements are better established by existing evidence and would take correspondingly more evidence to dislodge.
So the answer to “what evidence would be strong enough to change your mind?” varies a lot depending on exactly what is being asked.
I think it is notable and important that the different but similar things you said got different responses. One was downvoted unto automatic hiding (the threshold is set to hide at −3 or less (more negative) by default). One was downvoted much more. We can speculate as to why but its important to acknowledge different community responses to different behavior (I won’t prejudge it by saying “Different going against social beliefs”).
Onto speculation: one problem with the video as evidence for explosions was a certain kind of jumping to conclusions. The guy said he heard explosions, but this is skipping a step. I could just as well say I heard people in a box, when I had actually heard sound waves emitted by a speaker attached to a computer. The guy’s insistence that explosions were causing the sound is very strange, even granted that he had heard explosions before and the sounds he heard may have sounded exactly like those. Likewise for his claim they were coming from beneath him, considering what was going on.
Similarly, your assumption about the reason for your downvotes is certainly skipping steps. Most noticeable is how you don’t distinguish what you are being socially punished for among your several downvoted posts, but the response to them was so different.
It’s not so simple as that you were “go[ing] against their beliefs”. Not everyone uses the voting function identically, but assuming many others use it as I do I can offer an analysis. I use it to push things to where I think they should be, rather than as an expression that I was glad I read a post (in hopes others will do the same, such that votes reflect what individuals were glad to have read. I believe something like this was the intent of the system’s creators). I see −4 and −15 as not inappropriate final marks for your posts, and so didn’t weigh in on them through the voting mechanism.
The problem with your first post was that it unfairly pushed the work of argument onto Eliezer. This is the same problem with the poll sent out by the fundamentalists to philosophers a few months ago, I couldn’t find it, but it included questions such as “Do you agree: life begins at conception?” and “Do you agree: humans are unique and unlike the other animals?” The problem with that question is that the work/number of words needed to adequately disentangle and answer that exceed those required to ask it. Your question also didn’t start from anywhere, you would have gotten a better response if you had said you thought the beliefs either actually right or wrong but not insane.
The tl;dr is that it was a passive-aggressive question. A small sin, for which it gets a −4, as implicitly the one voicing it disagrees with it and is against the communal norm, how important that factor is, I can’t know.
The video evidence was a larger sin, as it was basically a waste of time to listen to it. First, the guy emphasized that he certainly heard explosions beneath him, as if by disbelieving that one would be thinking him to be a liar. Like I said above, this is the same thing ghost observers do: I don’t necessarily disbelieve you heard what you heard and saw what you saw, I just am unsure about the original cause of that noise, especially considering how humans hear what they hear based on what they are familiar with hearing and expecting to hear (the multiple-drafts model of cognition).
What’s more, when the advocate of a position has an opportunity to direct someone to evidence supporting his or her position and must elect to give them one piece of evidence in an attempt to spread the belief, I expect them to go with their best argument, which in turn ought to sound pretty impressive, as even incorrect positions often have one compelling argument in their favor.
If I had come across the video you showed as the first video I saw in the course of randomly watching accounts of 9/11 survivors (if a random sample of survivors were filmed and archived), it would be maybe perhaps be somewhat suspicious. As a video cherry picked by someone trying to justify skepticism, it’s catastrophically weak, shockingly so actually. I expect cherry picked evidence in favor of any conspiracy to at least induce a physiological response, e.g. OMG bush has reptilian eyes he is a reptile he is a lizard person, oh wait that’s stupid, it’s an artifact of light being shined on dozens of presidents millions of times and this video has been cherry-picked.
This is precisely the wrong way to start off a post like this, a very passive-aggressive tone.
Are you certain that it isn’t simply the tone of your posts?
Also bitterness. I think that you would benefit a lot by rephrasing your questions in a less confrontational manner.
could have become
Soften up your posts.
I never downvote, as I think it’s counterproductive. Others don’t agree, but that is their right. Taking it personally is not the right approach.
Edit—please disregard this post
Done. and done
Sorry, I can’t unread it.
I would welcome factual criticisms of my posts instead of just attacking the “tone” you read in them.
Right, the posts could be softened up, but isn’t it funny that you don’t direct the same criticism to the ones who called a certain point of view insane? How confrontational is that?
Characterizing helpful criticism as “attacking” is also not good.
I’m limited in my scope, I’m not going to follow links and criticize every single post. I happened to be reading yours, and thought that I might be able to help you with tone… others are probably better at dealing with actual content. If you would prefer me to not try to help you, let me know and I’ll focus my efforts elsewhere.
Edit—please disregard this post
I upvoted your comment prospectively. That is, it’ll be worth an upvote when you edit out the passive aggressive intro and I’m being optimistic. :)
We do. Not all the downvoting is moralizing but a significant subset is. And not all the moralizing is undesirable to me, even though a significant subset is.
For what it is worth, believing the WTC was loaded with explosives really is insane.
Following a suggestion from Cayenne:
wedrifid, I don’t understand how you arrived at this conclusion, could you explain the reasoning behind it?
How did you arrive at this conclusion? Did you really think it through or is it just a knee-jerk reaction?
The WTC being loaded with explosives is a much more complex explanation than the orthodox one—penalty.
The explosives theory involves a conspiracy—penalty.
The explosives theory can be and is used to score political points—penalty.
Explosive-theory advocates seem to prefer videos to text, which raises the time cost I have to pay to investigate it—penalty.
The explosives theory doesn’t make any goddamn sense—huge penalty.
Labeling these as 1-5 from top to bottom, 2 contributes to 1 (you may be double-penalizing if you’re counting them distinctly), and 4 (time cost to investigate) doesn’t seem like a valid reason to discount a hypothesis.
I don’t know whether I disagree with your conclusion—I haven’t bothered to read arguments about the topic and probably will continue to not do so because the expected value of such data is of pretty low for me—I just wanted to point out possible errors in your process.
2 contributes to 1, yes, but conspiracy hypotheses are flawed for reasons other than their complexity.
I agree with you on 4: it isn’t a reason to discount the hypothesis, but it is a reason to avoid seeking further information on the topic (high opportunity cost).
On reflection, I now regret engaging on this topic. My apologies for time wasted.
Please don’t. Your comment was an example that it is possible to reply politely and rationally even in a discussion on topic that you (presumably) consider irrational. That is a nice skill to have.
So does the traditional explanation.
So is the traditional explanation. War in Iraq, anyone?
This is a very silly reason to reject an idea.
Not always. Time-consuming investigations have a disutility value - if the prior for theories in this reference class multiplied by the utility of finding this idea to be true does not overcome that disutility, you ought not investigate. That is a very serious reason to reject an idea. If you do not give some weight to time costs of investigation, I have a reductio ad absurdum here that will monopolise your free time forever.
That’s true. But that’s a reason to not investigate and not read this thread and not think about the subject at all, not a reason to reply in this thread that the idea is unlikely, much less to declare it unlikely.
If your reaction to reading about the truther idea is “the value of knowing the facts about this issue, whatever they are, is rather low, and it would be time consuming to learn them, so I don’t care” that is A-OK. If your reaction is “the value of knowing the facts about this issue, whatever they are, is rather low, and it would be time consuming to learn them, therefore I am not going to update whatsoever on this issue and will ignore the evidence I know is available and yet still have a strong, high-confidence belief on it” then that seems kind of silly to me.
Does that make sense? Do you agree, or not? This is not an issue I feel very strongly about, but value of information is something I’ve been thinking about more recently and so I think that hearing others’ opinions on it would be useful. At the very least, worth the time to read them :) Amusing link, by the way.
I agree with you that “investigating is time-consuming” is not a defense for declaring ideas you don’t like to be unlikely.
If it’s a priori deemed unlikely, deciding not to investigate will lead to it staying this way, and one could as well express this state of knowledge in posting to the thread.
It’s a reason to keep the idea rejected, without giving it a chance to become accepted.
A brief continuance on the derailment of the thread:
The 9/11 attack undisputedly did involve a conspiracy.
The question here is, by whom? (a. just by foreign terrorists, b. an “inside job”).
What does that have to do with anything? A reduction in unemployment can be used to score political points...that certainly doesn’t make is unlikely
This is subjective—penalty?
The biggest point is: the orthodox explanation of the collapse seems robust to me on its own merits. There are other questions.
I think your points are all valid but they were downvoted because they are against the group belief.
Years ago, I formulated the “No Bullet Hypothesis” of the Kennedy assassination: he wasn’t hit by any bullets at all, his head just blew up. I had been thinking it was a peculiar form of spontaneous human combustion, perhaps involving Marilyn Monroe and Tibetan Nazis, but now I realize that his head must have been full of nano-thermite, possibly inserted during a trip to the presidential dentist.
I’m not sure that heavy sarcasm like this is constructive. While I thought it was funny, I think it encourages the audience to automatically disregard and deride the subject. In my experience, heavy sarcasm tends to both make the subject angry and reinforce the subject’s (erroneous?) beliefs.
My own sarcastic responses (about political or otherwise weighty matters) typically just polarize the group I’m in, making the new in-group like me and the new out-group dislike me.
This comment is awesome, and I’d like to think that if I believed the twin towers were destroyed by demolitions set off by the government I would still upvote it.
Do you think that people use the downvote to tell another user that they are a terrible person… or do they simply use it to express disagreement with a statement?
I think probably both happen, but it’s tilted heavily toward the latter. Feel free to downvote if you disagree. :)
There’s another possibility. I downvote when I felt that reading the post was a waste of my time and I also believe it wasted most other people’s time.
(This isn’t a veiled statement about Roland. I do not recall voting on any of his posts before.)
The problem with the downvote is that it mixes the messages “I don’t agree” with “I don’t think others should see this”. There is no way to say “I don’t agree, but that post was worth thinking about”, is there? Short of posting a comment of your own, that is.
That’s exactly what I do. I try to downvote comments based on how they’re written (if they’re rude or don’t make sense, I downvote them) instead of what they’re written about. (Though I may upvote comments based on agreeing with the content.)
That’s exactly what I do too. (Although my downvote threshold is likely a tad more sensitive. :P)
Likely. Mine will probably become more sensitive with time.
I think there is a positive outcome from the system as it is, at least for sufficiently optimistic people. The feature is that it should be obvious that downvoting is mixed with those and other things, which helps me not take anything personally.
Downvotes could be anything, and individuals have different criteria for voting, and as I am inclined to take things personally, this obviousness helps me. If I knew 50% of downvotes meant “I think the speaker is a bad person”, every downvote might make me feel bad. As downvotes currently could mean so many things, I am able to shrug them off. They could currently mean: the speaker is bad, the comment is bad, I disagree with the comment, I expect better from this speaker, it’s not fair/useful for this comment to be voted so highly rated compared to a similar adjacent comment that I would rather people read instead/I would like to promote as the communal norm, etc.
If one has an outlook that is pessimistic in a particular way, any mixing of single messages to multiple meanings will cause one to overly react as if the worst meaning is intended by a message, and this sort of person would be most helped by ensuring each message has only one meaning.
I’ve been known to upvote in such cases, if the post is otherwise neutral-or-better. I like to see things here that are worth thinking about.
Are there lots of other topics you feel this way about?
If it’s just this topic, that doesn’t seem like a very big deal to me. I have no doubt LW has at least a few topics where people have an unproductive moralizing response. However, if such toxicity uncommon and doesn’t affect important topics then I don’t think it’s a very big deal (though certainly worth avoiding).
It was made pretty clear in the other thread that the evidence linked was extremely weak.
Maybe that doesn’t justify −15, but a priori I’d downvote it.
ceteris paribus?
If I didn’t already know it’d been downvoted into the asthenosphere, I would have downvoted it. But as it stands now, there’s no reason for me to downvote it, because it’s already been downvoted enough.
I understood the message. But the latin phase was off. Ceteris paribus is the one that would fit.
Fair enough.