Oh come on. The post was downvoted because it was inflammatory and low quality. It made a sweeping assertion while providing no evidence except a link to an article that I have no reason to believe is worth reading. There is a mountain of evidence that being negative is not a sufficient cause for being downvoted on LW, e.g. the OP.
You absolutely have a reason to believe the article is worth reading.
If you live coordinated with an institution, spending 5 minutes of actually trying (every few months) to see if that institution is corrupt is a worthy use of time.
I don’t think I live coordinated with CFAR or MIRI, but it is true that, if they are corrupt, this is something I would like to know.
However, that’s not sufficient reason to think the article is worth reading. There are many articles making claims that, if true, I would very much like to know (e.g. someone arguing that the Christian Hell exists).
I think the policy I follow (although I hadn’t made it explicit until now) is to ignore claims like this by default but listen up as soon as I have some reason to believe that the source is credible.
Which incidentally was the case for the OP. I have spent a lot more than 5 minutes reading it & replies, and I have, in fact, updated on my view of CRAF and Miri. It wasn’t a massive update in the end, but it also wasn’t negligible. I also haven’t downvoted the OP, and I believe I also haven’t downvoted any comments from jessicata. I’ve upvoted some.
Oh come on. The post was downvoted because it was inflammatory and low quality. It made a sweeping assertion while providing no evidence except a link to an article that I have no reason to believe is worth reading. There is a mountain of evidence that being negative is not a sufficient cause for being downvoted on LW, e.g. the OP.
(FYI, the OP has 154 votes and 59 karma, so it is both heavily upvoted and heavily downvoted.)
You absolutely have a reason to believe the article is worth reading.
If you live coordinated with an institution, spending 5 minutes of actually trying (every few months) to see if that institution is corrupt is a worthy use of time.
I read the linked article, and my conclusion is that it’s not even in the neighborhood of “worth reading”.
I don’t think I live coordinated with CFAR or MIRI, but it is true that, if they are corrupt, this is something I would like to know.
However, that’s not sufficient reason to think the article is worth reading. There are many articles making claims that, if true, I would very much like to know (e.g. someone arguing that the Christian Hell exists).
I think the policy I follow (although I hadn’t made it explicit until now) is to ignore claims like this by default but listen up as soon as I have some reason to believe that the source is credible.
Which incidentally was the case for the OP. I have spent a lot more than 5 minutes reading it & replies, and I have, in fact, updated on my view of CRAF and Miri. It wasn’t a massive update in the end, but it also wasn’t negligible. I also haven’t downvoted the OP, and I believe I also haven’t downvoted any comments from jessicata. I’ve upvoted some.
This is fair, actually.