Note that you don’t need to explicitly dislike anything about a post to downvote it; it’s enough if you didn’t think it added anything. There’s lots of people posting stuff (I feel like it’s gotten more in the past year, too?) and limited space on the front page.
Or, you know, you can just be annoyed with the tone and downvote it without thinking much. The fact that downvotes are free (for the user who gives them out) and anyonymous encourages that kind of behavior.
Personally, I’m very annoyed with the phrase “many worlds interpretation of wave function collapse” because it gets things backwards; there is no collapse in the math. There’s the math describing the wave function, and then collapse is an additional postulate that, if adopted, makes the theory strictly more complex, and you can either accept this additional thing or not. But I usually wouldn’t bother writing a comment about it; I’d just tab out of the post and move on. It definitely makes me not want to look at the substantive argument further. (I didn’t downvote anything, though.)
I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this comment; I guess I’m trying to give you a sense of what may go on in the heads of people who reacted to this without writing anything. I guess the harsher intuitive feeling I’m talking around is something like “LW doesn’t owe you anything; if you want to get positive reception, it’s on you to figure out what kind of content the community appreciates and then create that”.
I’m not making a normative claim. The factual claim I’d make is that complex explanations detailing several factual reasons are a bad answer to “why did my post get downvoted” because most people most of the time don’t put anywhere near that much thought into their votes. (I also think votes on LW are way more meaningful than anywhere else on the internet, but I don’t see a contradiction.)
If people babble about why they downvoted, the babble will usually be related in some way even if it is imperfect. Also, your babble should be aligned with your sense of strategy rather than being arbitrary.
Also, your babble should be aligned with your sense of strategy
I don’t agree. (I think? I’m not sure what you mean by strategy.) I think your comment should try to track what’s actually going on, not what you want to be going on.
Also note that I was trying to give an impression of what the median response could be. (Which was itself not very well thought out, but that was the attempt.) And the people who take the time to comment have very likely put more thought into their vote than the median, so even if they represented their reasons accurately, it’d still be a distorted picture.
I think your comment should try to track what’s actually going on, not what you want to be going on.
Well the latter is obviously more arbitrary (and less strategic) than the former; you do need a non-misleading map to behave strategically within the territory, and the world does not get the way humans want it to be by convincing each other that it is already that way, except for some rare self-fulfilling prophecies such as your group’s collective belief in the ability to correct each other.
And the people who take the time to comment have very likely put more thought into their vote than the median, so even if they represented their reasons accurately, it’d still be a distorted picture.
A distorted picture of why it was downvoted? But if the karma is determined arbitrarily then it is questionably valuable apart from the subset which does respond.
Note that you don’t need to explicitly dislike anything about a post to downvote it; it’s enough if you didn’t think it added anything. There’s lots of people posting stuff (I feel like it’s gotten more in the past year, too?) and limited space on the front page.
Or, you know, you can just be annoyed with the tone and downvote it without thinking much. The fact that downvotes are free (for the user who gives them out) and anyonymous encourages that kind of behavior.
Personally, I’m very annoyed with the phrase “many worlds interpretation of wave function collapse” because it gets things backwards; there is no collapse in the math. There’s the math describing the wave function, and then collapse is an additional postulate that, if adopted, makes the theory strictly more complex, and you can either accept this additional thing or not. But I usually wouldn’t bother writing a comment about it; I’d just tab out of the post and move on. It definitely makes me not want to look at the substantive argument further. (I didn’t downvote anything, though.)
I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this comment; I guess I’m trying to give you a sense of what may go on in the heads of people who reacted to this without writing anything. I guess the harsher intuitive feeling I’m talking around is something like “LW doesn’t owe you anything; if you want to get positive reception, it’s on you to figure out what kind of content the community appreciates and then create that”.
Actually I think we should be called LessWrong for a reason.
I’m not making a normative claim. The factual claim I’d make is that complex explanations detailing several factual reasons are a bad answer to “why did my post get downvoted” because most people most of the time don’t put anywhere near that much thought into their votes. (I also think votes on LW are way more meaningful than anywhere else on the internet, but I don’t see a contradiction.)
If people babble about why they downvoted, the babble will usually be related in some way even if it is imperfect. Also, your babble should be aligned with your sense of strategy rather than being arbitrary.
I don’t agree. (I think? I’m not sure what you mean by strategy.) I think your comment should try to track what’s actually going on, not what you want to be going on.
Also note that I was trying to give an impression of what the median response could be. (Which was itself not very well thought out, but that was the attempt.) And the people who take the time to comment have very likely put more thought into their vote than the median, so even if they represented their reasons accurately, it’d still be a distorted picture.
Well the latter is obviously more arbitrary (and less strategic) than the former; you do need a non-misleading map to behave strategically within the territory, and the world does not get the way humans want it to be by convincing each other that it is already that way, except for some rare self-fulfilling prophecies such as your group’s collective belief in the ability to correct each other.
A distorted picture of why it was downvoted? But if the karma is determined arbitrarily then it is questionably valuable apart from the subset which does respond.
On that note, I’d love to get more feedback on this shortform of mine, which I feel is very underrated and full of great potential:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MveJKzvogJBQYaR7C/lvsn-s-shortform?commentId=e2TtdTbj5zbaGkE5c