So all of the above are obvious rationalizations and are also pathetic.
This is at least rude. Downvoted without having to read more. Learn about the principle of charity.
obvous
Illusion of transparency.
pathetic
Unnecessarily insulting. What do you mean on the object-level, and how could you say it in a way that is not rude?
Alsadius asserts that I’m overconfident and that I’m not thinking very clearly. That only makes sense if my comment is wrong
No. You can have true conclusions from a fallacious argument or false premises, or true beliefs following from faulty reasoning. And for example, precisely 100% is overconfident that the sun will rise tomorrow, even if it turns out to be correct.
Obviously I’m not criticizing literally each and every one of the people who visit this site,
Again, illusion of transparency. If you say the community, and the community means “the sum of [all] the individuals” here, then it is not obvious that you do not mean “each and every one of the people who visit this site”.
it makes sense to talk about groupthink
‘Groupthink’ is a highly technical term, and shouldn’t be bandied about. If you’re going to assert that without any evidence that it’s accurate, then I’m forced to assume that, like most usage of that term, it’s shorthand for “people disagree with me”.
If you (yes you, generic reader) find that the fact that everyone is criticizing me persuades you to criticize me, you know much less about fallacies than you think you do.
I don’t see what fallacies could possibly have to do with that; criticism is a behavior, not an argument or conclusion. And I don’t see how that follows, even if it did make sense—I don’t expect a generic reader to know much about fallacies, so I don’t see how that should necessarily indicate they know less about them.
Additionally, I reject (his?) claim that “the downvotes come from you making a claim about the quoted text that doesn’t seem particularly well supported”. −6 doesn’t happen as a result of a factual mistake, nor does +9 for a clever rationalization; both happen as a result of dislike for me as a person and because of social influences and not as a result of a flawed claim. The intensity of reactions to my posts got much stronger as it became apparent that rejecting my arguments was the hip new trend that all the cool kids were doing.
As far as I can tell, the large numbers of downvotes started rolling in when you started being rude. That’s why I downvoted. And overconfidence is not a mere factual mistake, it’s an error in reasoning, which is much more damning of a comment’s quality.
a result of dislike for me as a person
I was not under the impression anyone here knows you. Really, try not to take downvotes personally, they just mean your comments are really bad.
The parallels between that earlier comment and the text I quoted are obvious.
you keep using that word.
Ironically I was earlier criticized for arguing that the dark side wasn’t Voldemort’s soul. Apparently I’m damned whether I do or don’t.
I don’t think I need to be polite when I’m having everything I write be downvoted and “argued” against by about twelve different people. I’m pretty obviously being treated as a hostile, here, and there’s no reason I would want to be polite with people who see no problem being rude to me.
“Pathetic” is vague. I mean that the posters should be ashamed if they actually the counterarguments that they wrote because those counterarguments are very weak. They only appear strong if you read them without critically reflecting on what they’re actually saying, or on the implicit assumptions they are making.
By “groupthink” I mean that people are disagreeing with me simply because other people are disagreeing with me and because I already have negative karma. I also mean that they aren’t considering my arguments fairly, they’re only looking at the issue from a one sided perspective. I’m pretty sure that this is a standard interpretation of what “groupthink” means.
I think I do overuse the word obviously. But the parallels specifically really are obvious.
Substance
Again, illusion of transparency. If you say the community, and the community means “the sum of [all] the individuals” here, then it is not obvious that you do not mean “each and every one of the people who visit this site”.
You’re playing with semantics and taking quotes literally. I don’t think it makes much sense to act as though I think every person on LessWrong is an asshole. I think if you were using the principle of charity you would realize that my comments aren’t addressed at everyone on the site. You’re willfully being confused here.
No. You can have true conclusions from a fallacious argument or false premises, or true beliefs following from faulty reasoning. And for example, precisely 100% is overconfident that the sun will rise tomorrow, even if it turns out to be correct.
I understand this principle. I wasn’t arguing that I’m immune to criticism because I was correct in my conclusion. I was arguing that I shouldn’t be criticized because my reasoning process was objectively correct. Nothing that you said here is relevant to what I was contending.
I don’t see what fallacies could possibly have to do with that; criticism is a behavior, not an argument or conclusion. And I don’t see how that follows, even if it did make sense—I don’t expect a generic reader to know much about fallacies, so I don’t see how that should necessarily indicate they know less about them.
It is easier to reject a viewpoint if other people do not find that viewpoint credible. Like how all of America hates communism but very few can give substantive arguments as to why it is bad (not that I want to defend communism). It is “common sense” in America that communism is bad. When people hear someone or something being criticized, that makes it easier for them to think of reasons that the thing is bad or wrong and it makes it harder for them to think of how that thing might be good.
As far as I can tell, the large numbers of downvotes started rolling in when you started being rude. That’s why I downvoted. And overconfidence is not a mere factual mistake, it’s an error in reasoning, which is much more damning of a comment’s quality.
No, I started receiving lots of bad karma after a post I made in the earlier thread, and that trend spread to here. I didn’t just spontaneously start being rude, I was rude as a result of the way my comments have been received generally. I’ve received about −30 karma in the last twelve hours, that’s not warranted and it justifies a response, even if that response is angry.
I was not under the impression anyone here knows you. Really, try not to take downvotes personally, they just mean your comments are really bad.
Perhaps personally was the wrong word, but there are people going around downvoting everything I write simply because I am the one who wrote it. That is stupid. That makes me want to leave this site. That is bad for rationality. It’s also bad because it is mean.
I don’t think I need to be polite when I’m having everything I write be downvoted and “argued” against by about twelve different people.
Neither of these gives a licence for rudeness. Having a variety of people argue against a position is not a reason that defense of that position should be less polite. As to downvoting- you yourself said that people should care less about downvoting, so maybe do so?
In general, you need to think carefully about what your goals are. If your goals are to convince people then being polite helps. If your goal is to convince bystanders of your position or something similar then being polite still helps, because people are more inclined to take a position seriously when the one arguing for it is calm and polite. At a completely selfish level, being rude makes it harder to accept that one is wrong, due to cognitive dissonance issues and invested-effort/sunk cost issues. So if one wants to become less wrong one should try to be polite for purely selfish reasons.
I’ve always hated (not really but I’ve always disliked) people who take pains to be polite in discourse for the same reasons that I dislike people who take pains to frame themselves as victims. That’s actually why I capitalize mocked “The Voice of Polite Reason” above.
Manners are almost always used as a ploy for power. Manners hinder productive conversation and allow for framing techniques that automatically give certain positions more weight than others. I’ve never had a productive conversation in which I did not speak frankly. I feel basically the same way about manners as Nietzsche did about all of morality, upon reflection. Neato.
I care about downvoting because it reflects widespread ignorance and most people here seem to not recognize the ignorance. It sort of legitimizes the ignorance, as well, which would result in discarding a good theory which was not in my interests because I wanted to discuss the theory because I wanted to predict what would happen next. I never said that I think people should care less about receiving downvoting, I said that people should give out downvotes with less intensity and frequency.
I’ve always hated (not really but I’ve always disliked) people who take pains to be polite in discourse for the same reasons that I dislike people who take pains to frame themselves as victims.
You should get over that (the former). You’ll end up hating people simply for not being utterly naive. Getting along with people is necessary if you wish to achieve anything.
Manners are almost always used as a ploy for power.
Yes. It is a kind of power that people are willing to grant you and that, as far as ways to grab power go, has rather good externalities. Start using it.
Manners hinder productive conversation and allow for framing techniques that automatically give certain positions more weight than others.
Both good and bad manners do that. The bad ones make it easier.
I care about downvoting because it reflects widespread ignorance and most people here seem to not recognize the ignorance.
You are wrong. I haven’t followed closely enough to know whether the other guy was right but your own behavior in your comments is more than sufficient to get downvoted according to local norms—and you’d be shunned or shamed in most social environments where you tried to pull this crap.
If anything, there should be less rudeness and more downvoting on this site. For this community, rude disagreement and lack of downvoting would still be the default if we weren’t actively suppressing it.
Politeness is useful. Rudeness is the way to mind-killing. If you don’t want people to engage with your ideas rationally, be rude to them—that strategy works very well on humans.
Rudeness makes sense insofar as agents respond irrationally to claims that are addressed at them, I understand that claim although I wish it wasn’t true and I still prefer frankness to politeness, and I still don’t trust calls to “be polite”.
Additionally, I want a way to express frustration when I’m dealing with stupid things.
But most of the downvoting on this site seems to be a death spiral or a happy spiral. There are a disproportionate number of comments with +10 or −5 karma on this site, some of EY’s comments get like +50 which isn’t justified no matter how good the comment. That’s like the worth of an entire well done article. Why more downvoting?
This community appears to value politeness over rudeness (I know I do). If you don’t like that norm, you can find another community, or attempt to convince us that the norm is useless and we should stop enforcing it. Flouting the norm and being rude will just attract hostility.
+50 which isn’t justified no matter how good the comment.
Justification for voting applies to whether one clicks the “vote up” or “vote down” button. Ideally, this is done without reference to a comment’s current score. +50 just means that 50 of the readers (on net) thought it was upvote-worthy, and there are many more than 50 readers of the site.
That’s like the worth of an entire well done article.
FWIW, votes on articles (in main) are worth 10x the karma.
Why more downvoting?
Downvoting is our method of curation. It hides bad comments from casual readers. Curation is important because otherwise everything devolves into Reddit. See this post by Jeff Atwood.
In my opinion, roughly 1⁄3 of all comments you read should be downvoted. Sadly, that is not feasible in practice due to downvote limits. Others think that policy is too ‘harsh’, but are free to use a different algorithm for voting.
This has the effect of making unpopular opinions invisible.
I don’t see how there’s a risk this turns into Reddit. The post you linked to said that people are more likely to upvote funny memes, rather than useful stuff, given some of pedanterrific’s comment that has basically already happened here. I don’t think humor is even that bad. And the question of whether we should not do so many upvotes doesn’t impact whether we should do more downvotes on already neutral posts, which is what I’m concerned with.
Having moderators solves the Reddit problem.
You also aren’t addressing the fact that in practice people are more likely to (down)(up)vote things which have already been (down)(up)voted, which leads to karma sinks.
This has the effect of making unpopular opinions invisible.
That doesn’t seem to happen in practice (yet) - downvoted posts are usually much more likely to have a tone or quality problem than be an unusual opinion.
You also aren’t addressing the fact that in practice people are more likely to (down)(up)vote things which have already been (down)(up)voted, which leads to karma sinks.
Possible, but that’s not a huge problem in itself; and the effect doesn’t seem very strong (it’s not rare to see posts eventually change sign).
This has the effect of making unpopular opinions invisible.
I don’t think this is in general a problem. Well argued positions will generally be upvoted. I for example have spent time arguing here against cryonics, the likelyhood of an intelligence explosion, and whether Kolmogorov complexity priors make sense. In all such cases I’ve been upvoted.
It is likely that a poorly argued argument for accepted views will not be downvoted as heavily as poorly argued arguments for contrarian views. But that’s a different claim than that unpopular opinions will be invisible.
This has the effect of making unpopular opinions invisible.
That only happens if people are misusing voting. And it does not happen in my experience.
There have been entire threads that were upvoted quite a bit but included disagreeing opinions. And we have a fair number of dissenters hereabouts. And some of us tend to weight comments slightly higher if they represent a minority position (or one I disagree with), to counter that sort of effect.
And the question of whether we should not do so many upvotes doesn’t impact whether we should do more downvotes on already neutral posts, which is what I’m concerned with.
Those were separate points. Jeff was talking about SO’s moderation system, I’m talking about ours. I pointed to Jeff’s post to help you understand why curation is important; it is separate information that up and down votes are our method of curation.
You also aren’t addressing the fact that in practice people are more likely to (down)(up)vote things which have already been (down)(up)voted, which leads to karma sinks.
I did not see anything about that in your comment. What is a ‘karma sink’ and why is it bad? I agree that if people have this tendency, that’s bad, though I do not know how I would even observe this putative tendency in the wild.
The Reddit thing is reasoning by anology at best because the argument is that curation is key to stop useless things from becoming popular. You’re also completely shifting the Reddit thing from what you initially said it was supposed to show, from “curation key to stop LessWrong to becoming Reddit” to “it shows why curation is important”, where the reason it was important was “because it stops Reddit” but yet you conceded that the reason it’s important is not “because it stops Reddit”, there’s an implicit contradiction. All Jeff’s article says is that memes aren’t productive. Rude things aren’t inherently unproductive. And 1⁄3 negative karma means that we would get rid of many productive things, so more downvoting is still an awful idea.
Below stuff I agree with, except I disagree with Emile about the intensity of karma sinks, I think the effect is pretty strong. Personally, I’m experiencing some, and people are going around hating on everything I do, which sucks. Karma sinks are where people are more likely to downvote things that have been downvoted. It’s like the Communism example I gave earlier in a few different ways.
I don’t think you’re correctly using the phrase “karma sinks.” Or at least, you’re not using it the way I see it is typically used on LW. Karma sinks refer to comments users make in order for other commentators to purposefully downvote if they upvoted another specific comment. This is so we can do things like straw polls without the polling user gaining tens or hundreds of karma.
That might be unclear, so I’ll give an example. I recently made a comment asking whether people would be interested in a New Jersey meetup. I could have also asked those interested to upvote my comment so I could have a rough estimate of how many people are interested. As per community norms, I would also make a second comment for users to downvote if and only if they upvoted the first comment. This second post (the karma sink) would help assure my net gain is 0.
Anyway, that doesn’t invalidate your point. But for clearer communication, you may want to use a phrase like “positive feedback loop.” That seems to better describe what you’re talking about, where downvotes make it more likely that other users will also downvote, which in turn leads to even more downvotes, and so on.
They are, in part because they predictably make people behave less rationally.
And 1⁄3 negative karma means that we would get rid of many productive things
I don’t agree with your implicit estimate that less than 1⁄3 of the comments here are net negative contributions. Still, noise would indicate that your conclusion is correct—I’d expect even now some large amount of productive things are hidden from view.
so more downvoting is still an awful idea.
That does not follow (that you thought it followed is indicated by your use of “so”). If you wanted that to follow, you would have to also establish that people here actually do downvote at least 1⁄3 of the comments here, which is clearly false—even I don’t downvote that much.
I assert that people are extremely stingy with their downvotes.
I assert that people are extremely stingy with their downvotes.
I anecdotally second this assertion: I hardly ever downvote. I only downvote comments that I think are egregiously bad, and then not when they’re already well buried, which they usually are by the time I get there.
You’re also completely shifting the Reddit thing from what you initially said it was supposed to show, from “curation key to stop LessWrong to becoming Reddit” to “it shows why curation is important”, where the reason it was important was “because it stops Reddit” but yet you conceded that the reason it’s important is not “because it stops Reddit”, there’s an implicit contradiction.
I’m confused. Where did I assert that “because it stops Reddit” (in shorthand) is not a reason that curation is important?
Karma sinks are where people are more likely to downvote things that have been downvoted.
More likely than what?
I would expect that people are more likely to downvote things that have been downvoted, than things that haven’t been, since things that have been downvoted are generally more downvote-worthy.
It is possible that he means that more likely than if the comment were already in the positives. It might be interesting to compare the voting patterns in this regard of people who do or do not use the anti-kibbitzer.
It is possible that he means that more likely than if the comment were already in the positives.
Yes, that one makes sense, but I think one still needs to fix the referent of “the comment” a little more explicitly. Comments in the positives are generally better comments than those in the negatives. This assertion has to be about counterfactuals, or changes in karma of the same comment over time.
A piece of evidence against that tendency: highly contentious issues where tempers are high tend to get downvoted very quickly, then upvoted to well above 0 over a short period of time. It seems like it would be very hard to get out of the negatives if this tendency existed and were worth noting.
Ok, you don’t care about rudeness? You are being a fucking moron. You are deliberately being an aggressive dick and you’re surprised that these comments get downvoted? I don’t like people whining about being downvoted and if they CONTINUE to make stupid threads about how they shouldn’t be downvoted then they are even more annoying. You threatened to leave earlier. Please get the hell out.
since my account is already ruined, by continuing to bump this comment thread I can wage a war of attrition against you. there is no real impact to my receiving more negative karma although there is a high probability. conversely, there is a small probability that you’ll receive some negative reputation (or even better, this part would all be deleted) and there is also an impact to your credibility.
mostly this post is just me being frustrated though. i feel like lots of the other comments in this area were like your above comment, except that other people were less transparent about it and instead decided to neg karma everything I wrote, rather than just openly cursing me out
unless people want to thwart my intentions by neg karmaing me instead and leaving him alone
since my account is already ruined, by continuing to bump this comment thread I can wage a war of attrition against you. there is no real impact to my receiving more negative karma although there is a high probability. conversely, there is a small probability that you’ll receive some negative reputation (or even better, this part would all be deleted) and there is also an impact to your credibility.
You overstate the degree of ruination of your account and so I don’t quite support the details of your reasoning. Nevertheless, drethelin has something to learn from this. He gave you a lot of power over him. That’s usually a mistake.
mostly this post is just me being frustrated though. i feel like lots of the other comments in this area were like your above comment, except that other people were less transparent about it
Pretty much, yes. I think they call those ‘social skills’. Actually, drethelin is more or less following your no-politeness policy perfectly. Sometimes that is actually more pleasant to be on the receiving end of than the well crafted socially acceptable salvos.
I’ve always hated (not really but I’ve always disliked) people who take pains to be polite in discourse
Ironically, in the other thread you complained that my tone was too rude/snippy/paternalistic/whatever. In that thread I conceded that I was probably being a bit rude. In this thread you’re complaining that I’m paying attention to being polite.
So it seems that either being rude or being polite, either paying too little or too much attention to manners, will get you to insult and attack other people. Downvoted.
I don’t think I need to be polite when I’m having everything I write be downvoted and “argued” against by about twelve different people.
Consider the case where some mugger is pointing a gun at you. That should help give you a more practical perspective. Sure, the mugger doesn’t deserve politeness. It isn’t fair that politeness is necessary. But you still need to be polite to him if you wish to minimize the chance that he will shoot you in the head.
Sometimes other people really do behaving like dicks and be unreasonable or unfair. Yet that doesn’t mean you are obliged to sabotage yourself to get petty vengeance. You are free to follow whatever course of actions get you the best outcome. So what if that course happens to involve typing words that will cause other people to believe you are being polite to them? What matters is whether you get what you want in the end.
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone and I didn’t update when that was obviously false which was a big mistake. I was expecting that rationalists placed a low value on politeness, like I do. I still place that low value on politeness and I still think many of my arguments are correct but I’m willing to jump through hoops and am willing to accept the fact that others don’t accept my arguments.
I need the practice. Even though I don’t like being polite and don’t think it’s objectively good and don’t think that my previous comments were unjustified, I need to try to get better at being polite and make myself dislike it less, so that when I pragmatically need to be polite (like you advise) I’m capable of skillfully doing so.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation, but that’s hardly going to effect my behavior at this point. Lolz. Nyfb, guvf pbzzrag vf n jnl bs grfgvat zl arj hcqngrq zbqry bs gur pbzzragref juvpu fnlf gung V’yy erprvir zber onq xnezn.
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone and I didn’t update when that was obviously false which was a big mistake.
Even once Harry-potter related arguments are granted you you are left with a bunch of arguments about humans, their words, their behaviors and their motives that are objectively wrong too. The fact that their intent was interpersonal incivility does nothing to excuse the fact that the reasoning contained therein was naive, irrational and all around terrible thinking. (No, no ‘intellectual’ high ground for you. You were being all round silly.)
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation, but that’s hardly going to effect my behavior at this point.
Wait, what? I think you’re misinterpreting a lot of what I was doing. My goal isn’t incivility, my goal is getting my point across. Incivility was a means toward that goal, a means which obviously fails utterly in the context of this website. But certainly you’ll agree that since I’ve started behaving I should no longer get negative reputations, correct? Or are you going to punish me for my sins?
I’d also like to have a debate about manners somewhere else, if you’d like. I hate them and think being polite is in and of itself bad, and I also think manners are kind of oppressive, etc. For the purposes of that debate I would use manners (new means to an end).
I’m pretty sure that Nietzsche was legit, and that you shouldn’t just willy nilly call his arguments silly. He’s universally recognized as a Pretty Smart Guy. I’d be willing to have a discussion about either Nietzsche or Hume with anyone, on the condition that I don’t get bad karma’d into oblivion for disagreeing with a societal convention (ironically that this happens when I disagree with manners bolsters the strength of the argument that manners are stupid).
What arguments about humans and their behaviors and motives did I even make here? I don’t think I made any. I think you just wanted to make a list so that you could act as though that summarized everything I’ve said so that you could conclude I was wrong without actually discussing specific things that I wrote.
What arguments about humans and their behaviors and motives did I even make here?
Specific humans, their behaviors and motives. For example accusing someone of being disingenuous hits all three checkboxes.
I don’t think I made any. I think you just wanted to make a list so that you could act as though that summarized everything I’ve said so that you could conclude I was wrong without actually discussing specific things that I wrote.
I think you are saying more false things about a human, his behavior and his motives.
I’m pretty sure that Nietzsche was legit, and that you shouldn’t just willy nilly call his arguments silly. He’s universally recognized as a Pretty Smart Guy. I’d be willing to have a discussion about either Nietzsche or Hume with anyone
I know a little about Nietzsche and next to nothing about Hume. Philosopher talk bores me. That is, all that ‘philosophy’ that consists of quoting historical Philosophical figures. Actual ideas are somewhat more interesting. If the big names happened to express a particular idea better than other available sources then they may be worth quoting.
, on the condition that I don’t get bad karma’d into oblivion for disagreeing with a societal convention (ironically that this happens when I disagree with manners bolsters the strength of the argument that manners are stupid).
I don’t think that necessarily follows, from the perspective of identifying potentially desirable game theoretic equilibria.
Hume’s problem of induction is pretty awesome, if you’re looking for specific arguments. Nietzsche is often misinterpreted, if you want to understand his ideas you should read any summaries which were written by Giles Deleuze who is another smart person.
Hume was one of the first and best naturalists and his stuff is very easy to read (unlike Kant’s stuff which is all either entirely wrong or a more confusing way of phrasing the arguments that Hume had already made). Wikipedia’s list of entries is fairly informative, many philosophers who are awesome think that Hume was really smart.
Attention to Hume’s philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from “dogmatic slumbers” (circa 1770).[98]
According to Schopenhauer, “there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher taken together”.[99]
A. J. Ayer (1936), introducing his classic exposition of logical positivism, claimed: “The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume.”[100]
Albert Einstein (1915) wrote that he was inspired by Hume’s positivism when formulating his Special Theory of Relativity.[101]
Hume was called “the prophet of the Wittgensteinian revolution” by N. Phillipson, referring to his view that mathematics and logic are closed systems, disguised tautologies, and have no relation to the world of experience.[102]
Hume’s Problem of Induction was also of fundamental importance to the philosophy of Karl Popper.
I strongly recommend Hume. Nietzsche is pretty tough to understand and he goes off into poetics too often to be easily understood, it’s a lot of work without a proportional amount of gain. But Hume was a genius and was very good at communicating. His writings are very concise and informative and will almost certainly benefit you. Treatise on Human Nature is pretty good for a starter, as is Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. They are very short books and should only take about an hour or so to read.
Enquiry is a very short book, but the Treatise is not. I certainly couldn’t read it in an hour. The edition I have is about 300 pages long. Anyway, I agree that Hume is awesome. I think, though, that most what is of greatest value in his work (empiricism, the problem of induction, instrumental rationality, ethical anti-rationalism) is probably already part of the collective memeset at LW, in more sophisticated guise. So I’m not sure it would be worth it for the average LWer without a genuine interest in the history of philosophy to work their way through Hume.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think a lot of people here could learn a lot from.
I misremembered the length of Treatise. I agree that Hume will just tell you things that you probably already know if you visit this site. So people should read Nietzsche instead. Very good point.
To people who want to read Nietzsche: note that every secondary author except Giles Deleuze is probably misinterpreting Nietzsche’s work. Also note that Giles Deleuze uses Nietzsche like a historical sock puppet so that he can get his rhizomatic message of anticapitalism across. Deleuze is the best that I’ve found, but even his stuff is very selective. I didn’t do this personally, but I’ve often heard it repeated that new readers of Nietzsche should start with The Gay Science. That might be the best place to start.
The best parts of Nietzsche are the ones that no one seems to know about. The dangers of the safety of the “Last Man” is awesome. The parts where he talks about being a lion and recreating value is awesome. All of Zarasthustra is awesome. Twilight of the Idols is hilarious at times. The “pop culture” Nietzsche is nothing like the one in his actual books.
It helps to remember that Nietzsche was basically a Christian who found out that God was dead who then got incredibly sad and nihilistic and then worked his way through it by realizing his past and current ignorance, and becoming very critical of Christian ideals and he then found new and objective ideals to work for, and became awesome. He’s anti Christian, but he doesn’t criticize literally everything about them and they share some common ground. He hates them, but he also hates his past self. He also managed to fix his past self, and his books are meant to try to fix other people as well. He does feel empathy, he’s still human.
Also, he’s not responsible for the Nazis. That was his stupid evil sister’s fault.
He hates Schopenhauer, maybe reading Schopenhauer should be done before reading Nietzsche. Not sure.
Agreed both that Hume is awesome, and that most of his valuable insights are incorporated already in our memeset. If you want a clear, easy and fast to read version of the proto-form of that memeset from 300 years ago, there is nothing better than his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Spinoza has also many early insights, complementary to Hume’s (roughly, you could say that Hume anticipates LW’s epistemology and metaethics, and Spinoza anticipates LW’s naturalistic metaphysics and computationalist philosophy of mind) but Spinoza is more difficult to read casually with profit because of his outdated terminology (e.g. “God” instead of “the Universe”) and his tiresome pretense of deducing everything from self-evident principles.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation
Thinking in terms of “capitulation” or similar notions of losing, winning and surrender is not helpful. One doesn’t update views as much when one feels like something is at risk of being lost. Trying not to think that way may be helpful.
Please stop commenting on my comments for a while unless you’re actually making an argument instead of A Witty Remark.
I’ll interpret this like Alicorn did, and stop responding to your comments. We do have a weak norm in favor of respecting such requests.
If you’d actually like answers to the questions you posed in the parent, please restate them in a more readable fashion and let me know you actually would like a response.
I have upvoted this comment. Even though I’m not thrilled with the way chaosmosis has been conducting emself, “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be” is a reasonable sentiment and doesn’t need to be attacked.
I read the above (grandparent) comment not as “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be”, but instead as “I can tell that everything you say is a veiled insult, everyone’s against me, I am being punished by shadowy figures, when I act poorly it’s your fault”. Am I missing something?
I would go through and elaborate on how I read it, but it’s gone now. Apparently chaosmosis endorses my interpretation, which is at least some evidence that I had it right.
I have upvoted this comment. Even though I’m not thrilled with the way chaosmosis has been conducting emself, “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be” is a reasonable sentiment and doesn’t need to be attacked.
I downvoted the comment as a (mildly) inappropriate personal attack. It’s not all that much different in nature to other acts of social aggression against the reputation of an individual. Occasionally a context will arise where such an utterance is justified but this isn’t one of them.
Regarding the ‘leave me be’ in particular, people do not have the right to choose when others are permitted reply to public utterances—and such a power would be far too exploitable were it to be granted.
people do not have the right to choose when others are permitted reply to public utterances—and such a power would be far too exploitable were it to be granted.
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone
The content of comments usually matters more than the tone because usually the tone is OK; you only “lose points” for a bad tone (which is rare), you won’t get a lot of credit here if you combine lousy arguments with a great presentation (unlike on say a TV show).
You may want to look into Crocker’s Rules, which have been invoked a few times here, and cause much less friction than your “reverse Crocker’s Rules”.
Everyone can use Crocker’s Rules on me unless I tell them to stop.
Actually, everybody but thomblake, because he’s super annoying and would abuse the privilege.
I’ll be polite and say thankee sai and yes ma’am unless people tell me I’m allowed to do otherwise.
That’s basically what I said above.
Do you consider my evil supervillain comments to be rude? I meant them to be a not-rude alternative for expressing my sentiments, plus for them to have a little humor also. They’ve gotten negative karma but I think that’s just from the few commenters who love thomblake.
Everyone can use Crocker’s Rules on me unless I tell them to stop.
As per my standard policy I decline your invitation—because most of the social consequences for the speaker who follows said rules are not significantly influenced by the declaration.
Also, when people say “Make yourself at home” I don’t start walking around naked and eating all the food. In fact, in my typical experience when people actually say that I find that more formality and protocol is indicated than in more casual interactions where nobody considers the need.
(This isn’t a critique of your motives. It’s me expressing little faith in this particular signalling mechanism.)
Standard Disclaimer: I do not want thomblake’s opinion on this comment.
I advise against inserting this into comments. I also advise against mentioning thomblake in general; you should be aiming for and holding up your end of mutual nonmention and nonreply.
FWIW, feel free to be as rude to me as you want; I operate by Crocker’s Rules.
That said, I feel compelled to point out that—as far as I can tell—whenever Roland says “thankee sai”, he does so not as some sort of a minimum-effort implementation of social protocols, but because he genuinely respects the person he’s thanking. That’s an admirable character trait, IMO.
I use “thankee sai” whenever possible in the hope that people will catch the reference. I agree that Roland specifically is awesome, and I respect people who are legitimately polite even if I think that being concerned about politeness is a bad thing and that insisting on politeness is usually just a different way to be rude, etc. But Roland’s pretty admirable and I thought he was genuine. He’s also inhumanely vicious in attempting to complete his quest.
How did you like the ending (if necessary use rot13)? I loved it. It’s even better in the context of the fact that the literature juvpu jnf jevggra orsberunaq nobhg puvyqr ebynaq nyy srngherq znal qvssrerag irefvbaf bs ubj ur pnzr gb gur gbjre. Nyy bs gurfr irefvbaf pna or fvzhygnarbhfyl gehr haqre Xvat’f raqvat, nygubhtu gung cebonoyl jnfa’g uvf vagrag. Ohg vg znxrf gur raqvat rira orggre.
Everyone got a good ending but Oy, who deserved better than he got.
I haven’t been able to discuss the ending because no one I know has finished the series.
I haven’t been able to discuss the ending because no one I know has finished the series.
I hate to disappoint you, but I am one of those people :-( I am going through the series on audiobook, which means that I make progress on it only during long trips. I was pretty disappointed by the 4th installment, Wizard and Glass, because it’s basically a giant flashback where very little actually happens, so my reading speed declined sharply after that...
Everything past the first two books is boring and kind of suckish until the very ending, IMHO. You might just want to skip to the last book after reading plot summaries of the ones you haven’t listened to yet. The ending is the best part of the entire series, hands down (except that some people hated it, I think that’s because they got emotionally invested because of Roland’s long hard journey).
The Stephen King book about Annie, an insane woman, who kidnaps a hack writer because she’s his “number one fan” is a great book. I don’t remember the title. Also, IT is one of my favorite books.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation
Just a note for those who might feel inclined to downvote complaints about downvotes—this is clearly a testable prediction about downvotes, which surely should be upvoted.
ETA: For those inclined to downvote discussion of voting and karma in general, I have happily provided a softer target.
“This comment will be downvoted” is a testable prediction, agreed. ”This comment will be downvoted because it’s not a capitulation” is not a testable prediction. Regardless of its testability, it is also an attempt to impose a specific interpretation on all downvotes. It asserts that my downvote is an expression of the desire for chaosmosis to capitulate, rather than an expression of the desire to have fewer comments like his on LW.
I jumped through hoops for you and acted politely, why would you do this?
Are you just a jerk?
(See how I’m still jumping through hoops and didn’t swear at you despite your obvious jerkishness, and also see how I lured you in with my Xanatos Gambit? Mwhahahaha! Evil triumphs again, you poor pitiful fool.)
I’m confused. What did I do that was jerklike? I was under the impression that you disliked downvotes, and my comment’s intent was to dispel a source of confusion that would cause some people to erroneously downvote your comment.
Several people (myself included) do tend to downvote comments for whining about downvotes.
there’s no reason I would want to be polite with people who see no problem being rude to me.
Then expect to be downvoted—anyone else being rude to you will be downvoted as well (not necessarily on net).
By “groupthink” I mean that people are disagreeing with me simply because other people are disagreeing with me and because I already have negative karma. I also mean that they aren’t considering my arguments fairly, they’re only looking at the issue from a one sided perspectively. I’m pretty sure that this is a standard interpretation of what “groupthink” means.
Leaving aside the common “people are disagreeing with me” interpretation, I still don’t think that’s what people (non-technically) mean when they use the word “groupthink”. “Groupthink” (in the popular usage) implies that there are beliefs common to the group that are not questioned—for example, accusing Less Wrong of “groupthink” because a comment against cryonics was highly criticized would be the common usage.
Really, it should not be used that way either though, since it’s too similar to the technical meaning of the term but entirely wrong.
You’re playing with semantics and taking quotes literally. … You’re willfully being confused here.
No, I was not confused about what you meant—I was pointing out how it was not obvious. If you say “Obviously X” and I think X is also obvious to me, then I still might have grounds for arguing that X is not obvious in general. In fact, unless you’re talking about something like the color of an object that a particular group of people are currently staring at, it’s best to assume that nothing is obvious. If you do use the word “obvious”, you should expect objections from people who did not find it obvious, and expect some of them to feel that you are insulting their intelligence.
I do not see how I was playing with semantics. Yes, I take what you write literally. If you do not want me to read the words that you write, then do not write them on this website, as I will probably get around to reading all of them eventually.
Nothing that you said here is relevant to what I was contending.
Usually, “if my comment was wrong” refers to its factual accuracy, not the quality of your reasoning. So following an accusation of overconfidence with “that would only make sense if my comment was wrong” is misleading.
It is easier to reject a viewpoint if other people do not find that viewpoint credible....
I’m familiar with that effect, but I don’t see how it’s a response to either of my statements.
No, I started receiving lots of bad karma after a post I made in the earlier thread, and that trend spread to here.
Well I, for one, did not read or downvote anything you said in that other thread until I read this one. Now I’ve gone back and downvoted all the low-quality comments you made in that thread (note: that is not all of your comments).
there are people going around downvoting everything I write simply because I am the one who wrote it. That is stupid.
There are more constructive things to call that behavior other than “stupid”. And I’d like to know how you know that’s what people are doing—I have no tools that let me detect that, and looking back at your comment history you have some recent comments that are not at a net negative.
I’m done protecting the theory. I don’t have the time to argue with this many different people.
If I haven’t convinced you yet then it’s either impossible because I’m wrong or impossible because you don’t want to understand or you’re lying. I don’t much care either way, because I don’t believe that any reasonable observer would conclude that the remaining objections to what I’ve been saying are actually important. I believe that I’ve done enough to convince someone who is actually interested in knowing what happened, and that I can never convince anyone if the amount of work I’ve done so far isn’t enough.
You’ve been willfully ignorant and willfully misinterpreted me, and your disdain for debate and your rejection of “convincing” because it’s apparently associated with debate is incredibly stupid. You are acting like an idiot. If convincing shouldn’t be my primary goal, then I should stop this conversation. Your own “objection” would support my point if you thought through what you were saying and what I said. You’re clearly not concerned with doing that, however. The fact that I’m dealing with so many people who don’t bother to answer their own questions or to consider arguments before making them is the very reason that I won’t be wasting anymore time on defending my theory. You obviously aren’t interested in predicting what will or what has happened so much as you are interested in attacking me, hence the useless comment you just made.
Either you are being irrational or Aumann is wrong, given his qualifications and your above fallacies I would bet it’s the former. Please stop being stupid.
I’ve seen plenty of upvoted comments along the lines of “I’m not very smart (score below 100 on IQ tests) but want to understand this point—can someone explain it more simply?”. Stupidity is not punished, though it’s possible that many of its effects are.
Good point. I was equivocating technical stupid (scores low on IQ test) with colloquial/slangy stupid (not putting a lot of mental effort into comments, irrational, and/ or obtuse).
The process of true Bayesians coming to agreement bears precious little resemblance to a typical human argument.
;
You’ve been willfully ignorant and willfully misinterpreted me
You have a bad model of me.
Either you are being irrational or Aumann is wrong
Aumann’s Agreement Theorem only applies to perfectly rational agents in particular idealized circumstances, as much as it’s used colloquially hereabouts as though it says anything about humans.
And yes, I’m being massively irrational. I am a human. You are also being massively irrational. If you have figured out how to stop doing that, then please let us know.
your above fallacies
I did not see any fallacies. Given that I am an expert on logic, I expect that you’re just using the word wrong.
your disdain for debate and your rejection of “convincing” because it’s apparently associated with debate is incredibly stupid.
I’m still unsure what you mean by “stupid” on the object level.
For humans, being in debate-mode tends to be a bad idea with respect to truth-seeking. Once you start arguing for a position, it is very difficult to update your beliefs on new evidence.
If you have evidence, state your evidence, update on the evidence presented by others, and everybody wins. Entering into debate-mode or being rude is a great way to discourage rationality in both yourself and any respondents.
“If you have evidence, state your evidence, update on the evidence presented by others, and everybody wins.”
The people who downvote the evidence win more.
In the spoiler problem from a while ago, someone else linked to an example conversation purporting to demonstrate why the policy was a good idea. I demonstrated that it was impossible, once the user had asked his question, for the conversation to have ended without causing the alleged harm done by revealing the spoiler. Someone responded by telling me that it’s not up for discussion and no-one except Eliezer is allowed to have an opinion on whether it is a good or effective policy.
Someone responded by telling me that it’s not up for discussion and no-one except Eliezer is allowed to have an opinion on whether it is a good or effective policy.
To clarify, I don’t think this, and you are of course allowed to have an opinion (as long as you’ve filled out the proper paperwork). I just meant that he has veto power. (Also, I was rather frustrated with the conversation at that point. Sorry.)
Someone responded by telling me that it’s not up for discussion and no-one except Eliezer is allowed to have an opinion on whether it is a good or effective policy.
Do you understand why people (me included) feel that you under-clarify your arguments?
Do you realise that we (me, and I guess thornblake as well) do not mean you any harm? That harming you could not possibly help us (sorry, it could, marginally so, if it actually had a behavioural impact)?
Furthermore, it is hard to get social benefits from downvoting, since others can’t see anyone downvote you. This does NOT have the same social effect as denouncing something in public.
This is at least rude. Downvoted without having to read more. Learn about the principle of charity.
Illusion of transparency.
Unnecessarily insulting. What do you mean on the object-level, and how could you say it in a way that is not rude?
No. You can have true conclusions from a fallacious argument or false premises, or true beliefs following from faulty reasoning. And for example, precisely 100% is overconfident that the sun will rise tomorrow, even if it turns out to be correct.
Again, illusion of transparency. If you say the community, and the community means “the sum of [all] the individuals” here, then it is not obvious that you do not mean “each and every one of the people who visit this site”.
‘Groupthink’ is a highly technical term, and shouldn’t be bandied about. If you’re going to assert that without any evidence that it’s accurate, then I’m forced to assume that, like most usage of that term, it’s shorthand for “people disagree with me”.
I don’t see what fallacies could possibly have to do with that; criticism is a behavior, not an argument or conclusion. And I don’t see how that follows, even if it did make sense—I don’t expect a generic reader to know much about fallacies, so I don’t see how that should necessarily indicate they know less about them.
As far as I can tell, the large numbers of downvotes started rolling in when you started being rude. That’s why I downvoted. And overconfidence is not a mere factual mistake, it’s an error in reasoning, which is much more damning of a comment’s quality.
I was not under the impression anyone here knows you. Really, try not to take downvotes personally, they just mean your comments are really bad.
you keep using that word.
True conclusions are not a shield from criticism.
Preliminaries
I don’t think I need to be polite when I’m having everything I write be downvoted and “argued” against by about twelve different people. I’m pretty obviously being treated as a hostile, here, and there’s no reason I would want to be polite with people who see no problem being rude to me.
“Pathetic” is vague. I mean that the posters should be ashamed if they actually the counterarguments that they wrote because those counterarguments are very weak. They only appear strong if you read them without critically reflecting on what they’re actually saying, or on the implicit assumptions they are making.
By “groupthink” I mean that people are disagreeing with me simply because other people are disagreeing with me and because I already have negative karma. I also mean that they aren’t considering my arguments fairly, they’re only looking at the issue from a one sided perspective. I’m pretty sure that this is a standard interpretation of what “groupthink” means.
I think I do overuse the word obviously. But the parallels specifically really are obvious.
Substance
You’re playing with semantics and taking quotes literally. I don’t think it makes much sense to act as though I think every person on LessWrong is an asshole. I think if you were using the principle of charity you would realize that my comments aren’t addressed at everyone on the site. You’re willfully being confused here.
I understand this principle. I wasn’t arguing that I’m immune to criticism because I was correct in my conclusion. I was arguing that I shouldn’t be criticized because my reasoning process was objectively correct. Nothing that you said here is relevant to what I was contending.
It is easier to reject a viewpoint if other people do not find that viewpoint credible. Like how all of America hates communism but very few can give substantive arguments as to why it is bad (not that I want to defend communism). It is “common sense” in America that communism is bad. When people hear someone or something being criticized, that makes it easier for them to think of reasons that the thing is bad or wrong and it makes it harder for them to think of how that thing might be good.
No, I started receiving lots of bad karma after a post I made in the earlier thread, and that trend spread to here. I didn’t just spontaneously start being rude, I was rude as a result of the way my comments have been received generally. I’ve received about −30 karma in the last twelve hours, that’s not warranted and it justifies a response, even if that response is angry.
Perhaps personally was the wrong word, but there are people going around downvoting everything I write simply because I am the one who wrote it. That is stupid. That makes me want to leave this site. That is bad for rationality. It’s also bad because it is mean.
Neither of these gives a licence for rudeness. Having a variety of people argue against a position is not a reason that defense of that position should be less polite. As to downvoting- you yourself said that people should care less about downvoting, so maybe do so?
In general, you need to think carefully about what your goals are. If your goals are to convince people then being polite helps. If your goal is to convince bystanders of your position or something similar then being polite still helps, because people are more inclined to take a position seriously when the one arguing for it is calm and polite. At a completely selfish level, being rude makes it harder to accept that one is wrong, due to cognitive dissonance issues and invested-effort/sunk cost issues. So if one wants to become less wrong one should try to be polite for purely selfish reasons.
I’ve always hated (not really but I’ve always disliked) people who take pains to be polite in discourse for the same reasons that I dislike people who take pains to frame themselves as victims. That’s actually why I capitalize mocked “The Voice of Polite Reason” above.
Manners are almost always used as a ploy for power. Manners hinder productive conversation and allow for framing techniques that automatically give certain positions more weight than others. I’ve never had a productive conversation in which I did not speak frankly. I feel basically the same way about manners as Nietzsche did about all of morality, upon reflection. Neato.
I care about downvoting because it reflects widespread ignorance and most people here seem to not recognize the ignorance. It sort of legitimizes the ignorance, as well, which would result in discarding a good theory which was not in my interests because I wanted to discuss the theory because I wanted to predict what would happen next. I never said that I think people should care less about receiving downvoting, I said that people should give out downvotes with less intensity and frequency.
You should get over that (the former). You’ll end up hating people simply for not being utterly naive. Getting along with people is necessary if you wish to achieve anything.
Yes. It is a kind of power that people are willing to grant you and that, as far as ways to grab power go, has rather good externalities. Start using it.
Both good and bad manners do that. The bad ones make it easier.
You are wrong. I haven’t followed closely enough to know whether the other guy was right but your own behavior in your comments is more than sufficient to get downvoted according to local norms—and you’d be shunned or shamed in most social environments where you tried to pull this crap.
I’ve never had the opportunity to respond to a single comment with both of these, but if you haven’t yet, you should check out Well-kept gardens die of pacifism and Why our kind can’t cooperate. (the latter is less directly relevant)
If anything, there should be less rudeness and more downvoting on this site. For this community, rude disagreement and lack of downvoting would still be the default if we weren’t actively suppressing it.
Politeness is useful. Rudeness is the way to mind-killing. If you don’t want people to engage with your ideas rationally, be rude to them—that strategy works very well on humans.
Rudeness makes sense insofar as agents respond irrationally to claims that are addressed at them, I understand that claim although I wish it wasn’t true and I still prefer frankness to politeness, and I still don’t trust calls to “be polite”.
Additionally, I want a way to express frustration when I’m dealing with stupid things.
But most of the downvoting on this site seems to be a death spiral or a happy spiral. There are a disproportionate number of comments with +10 or −5 karma on this site, some of EY’s comments get like +50 which isn’t justified no matter how good the comment. That’s like the worth of an entire well done article. Why more downvoting?
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
This community appears to value politeness over rudeness (I know I do). If you don’t like that norm, you can find another community, or attempt to convince us that the norm is useless and we should stop enforcing it. Flouting the norm and being rude will just attract hostility.
Justification for voting applies to whether one clicks the “vote up” or “vote down” button. Ideally, this is done without reference to a comment’s current score. +50 just means that 50 of the readers (on net) thought it was upvote-worthy, and there are many more than 50 readers of the site.
FWIW, votes on articles (in main) are worth 10x the karma.
Downvoting is our method of curation. It hides bad comments from casual readers. Curation is important because otherwise everything devolves into Reddit. See this post by Jeff Atwood.
In my opinion, roughly 1⁄3 of all comments you read should be downvoted. Sadly, that is not feasible in practice due to downvote limits. Others think that policy is too ‘harsh’, but are free to use a different algorithm for voting.
This has the effect of making unpopular opinions invisible.
I don’t see how there’s a risk this turns into Reddit. The post you linked to said that people are more likely to upvote funny memes, rather than useful stuff, given some of pedanterrific’s comment that has basically already happened here. I don’t think humor is even that bad. And the question of whether we should not do so many upvotes doesn’t impact whether we should do more downvotes on already neutral posts, which is what I’m concerned with.
Having moderators solves the Reddit problem.
You also aren’t addressing the fact that in practice people are more likely to (down)(up)vote things which have already been (down)(up)voted, which leads to karma sinks.
That doesn’t seem to happen in practice (yet) - downvoted posts are usually much more likely to have a tone or quality problem than be an unusual opinion.
Possible, but that’s not a huge problem in itself; and the effect doesn’t seem very strong (it’s not rare to see posts eventually change sign).
I don’t think this is in general a problem. Well argued positions will generally be upvoted. I for example have spent time arguing here against cryonics, the likelyhood of an intelligence explosion, and whether Kolmogorov complexity priors make sense. In all such cases I’ve been upvoted.
It is likely that a poorly argued argument for accepted views will not be downvoted as heavily as poorly argued arguments for contrarian views. But that’s a different claim than that unpopular opinions will be invisible.
That only happens if people are misusing voting. And it does not happen in my experience.
There have been entire threads that were upvoted quite a bit but included disagreeing opinions. And we have a fair number of dissenters hereabouts. And some of us tend to weight comments slightly higher if they represent a minority position (or one I disagree with), to counter that sort of effect.
Those were separate points. Jeff was talking about SO’s moderation system, I’m talking about ours. I pointed to Jeff’s post to help you understand why curation is important; it is separate information that up and down votes are our method of curation.
I did not see anything about that in your comment. What is a ‘karma sink’ and why is it bad? I agree that if people have this tendency, that’s bad, though I do not know how I would even observe this putative tendency in the wild.
The Reddit thing is reasoning by anology at best because the argument is that curation is key to stop useless things from becoming popular. You’re also completely shifting the Reddit thing from what you initially said it was supposed to show, from “curation key to stop LessWrong to becoming Reddit” to “it shows why curation is important”, where the reason it was important was “because it stops Reddit” but yet you conceded that the reason it’s important is not “because it stops Reddit”, there’s an implicit contradiction. All Jeff’s article says is that memes aren’t productive. Rude things aren’t inherently unproductive. And 1⁄3 negative karma means that we would get rid of many productive things, so more downvoting is still an awful idea.
Below stuff I agree with, except I disagree with Emile about the intensity of karma sinks, I think the effect is pretty strong. Personally, I’m experiencing some, and people are going around hating on everything I do, which sucks. Karma sinks are where people are more likely to downvote things that have been downvoted. It’s like the Communism example I gave earlier in a few different ways.
I don’t think you’re correctly using the phrase “karma sinks.” Or at least, you’re not using it the way I see it is typically used on LW. Karma sinks refer to comments users make in order for other commentators to purposefully downvote if they upvoted another specific comment. This is so we can do things like straw polls without the polling user gaining tens or hundreds of karma.
That might be unclear, so I’ll give an example. I recently made a comment asking whether people would be interested in a New Jersey meetup. I could have also asked those interested to upvote my comment so I could have a rough estimate of how many people are interested. As per community norms, I would also make a second comment for users to downvote if and only if they upvoted the first comment. This second post (the karma sink) would help assure my net gain is 0.
Anyway, that doesn’t invalidate your point. But for clearer communication, you may want to use a phrase like “positive feedback loop.” That seems to better describe what you’re talking about, where downvotes make it more likely that other users will also downvote, which in turn leads to even more downvotes, and so on.
I think you mean “positive feedback loop” of downvotes.
Ah, silly me. Correcting some else while making a mistake. You’re correct, thanks.
Another possibility might be “information cascade”, which refers to this specific phenomenon.
They are, in part because they predictably make people behave less rationally.
I don’t agree with your implicit estimate that less than 1⁄3 of the comments here are net negative contributions. Still, noise would indicate that your conclusion is correct—I’d expect even now some large amount of productive things are hidden from view.
That does not follow (that you thought it followed is indicated by your use of “so”). If you wanted that to follow, you would have to also establish that people here actually do downvote at least 1⁄3 of the comments here, which is clearly false—even I don’t downvote that much.
I assert that people are extremely stingy with their downvotes.
I anecdotally second this assertion: I hardly ever downvote. I only downvote comments that I think are egregiously bad, and then not when they’re already well buried, which they usually are by the time I get there.
I’m confused. Where did I assert that “because it stops Reddit” (in shorthand) is not a reason that curation is important?
More likely than what?
I would expect that people are more likely to downvote things that have been downvoted, than things that haven’t been, since things that have been downvoted are generally more downvote-worthy.
It is possible that he means that more likely than if the comment were already in the positives. It might be interesting to compare the voting patterns in this regard of people who do or do not use the anti-kibbitzer.
Yes, that one makes sense, but I think one still needs to fix the referent of “the comment” a little more explicitly. Comments in the positives are generally better comments than those in the negatives. This assertion has to be about counterfactuals, or changes in karma of the same comment over time.
A piece of evidence against that tendency: highly contentious issues where tempers are high tend to get downvoted very quickly, then upvoted to well above 0 over a short period of time. It seems like it would be very hard to get out of the negatives if this tendency existed and were worth noting.
Typo? That sounds contradictory.
Yes, edited to fix that while you were replying.
Ok, you don’t care about rudeness? You are being a fucking moron. You are deliberately being an aggressive dick and you’re surprised that these comments get downvoted? I don’t like people whining about being downvoted and if they CONTINUE to make stupid threads about how they shouldn’t be downvoted then they are even more annoying. You threatened to leave earlier. Please get the hell out.
The problem is that you didn’t make any arguments with your rudeness. Asshole.
Let me restate, in simpler words. YOU ARE BEING ANNOYING. THIS GETS DOWNVOTES. IT IS THAT SIMPLE. GO AWAY.
since my account is already ruined, by continuing to bump this comment thread I can wage a war of attrition against you. there is no real impact to my receiving more negative karma although there is a high probability. conversely, there is a small probability that you’ll receive some negative reputation (or even better, this part would all be deleted) and there is also an impact to your credibility.
mostly this post is just me being frustrated though. i feel like lots of the other comments in this area were like your above comment, except that other people were less transparent about it and instead decided to neg karma everything I wrote, rather than just openly cursing me out
unless people want to thwart my intentions by neg karmaing me instead and leaving him alone
unless that would play right into my hands
unless...
You overstate the degree of ruination of your account and so I don’t quite support the details of your reasoning. Nevertheless, drethelin has something to learn from this. He gave you a lot of power over him. That’s usually a mistake.
Pretty much, yes. I think they call those ‘social skills’. Actually, drethelin is more or less following your no-politeness policy perfectly. Sometimes that is actually more pleasant to be on the receiving end of than the well crafted socially acceptable salvos.
Ironically, in the other thread you complained that my tone was too rude/snippy/paternalistic/whatever. In that thread I conceded that I was probably being a bit rude. In this thread you’re complaining that I’m paying attention to being polite.
So it seems that either being rude or being polite, either paying too little or too much attention to manners, will get you to insult and attack other people. Downvoted.
Consider the case where some mugger is pointing a gun at you. That should help give you a more practical perspective. Sure, the mugger doesn’t deserve politeness. It isn’t fair that politeness is necessary. But you still need to be polite to him if you wish to minimize the chance that he will shoot you in the head.
Sometimes other people really do behaving like dicks and be unreasonable or unfair. Yet that doesn’t mean you are obliged to sabotage yourself to get petty vengeance. You are free to follow whatever course of actions get you the best outcome. So what if that course happens to involve typing words that will cause other people to believe you are being polite to them? What matters is whether you get what you want in the end.
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone and I didn’t update when that was obviously false which was a big mistake. I was expecting that rationalists placed a low value on politeness, like I do. I still place that low value on politeness and I still think many of my arguments are correct but I’m willing to jump through hoops and am willing to accept the fact that others don’t accept my arguments.
I need the practice. Even though I don’t like being polite and don’t think it’s objectively good and don’t think that my previous comments were unjustified, I need to try to get better at being polite and make myself dislike it less, so that when I pragmatically need to be polite (like you advise) I’m capable of skillfully doing so.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation, but that’s hardly going to effect my behavior at this point. Lolz. Nyfb, guvf pbzzrag vf n jnl bs grfgvat zl arj hcqngrq zbqry bs gur pbzzragref juvpu fnlf gung V’yy erprvir zber onq xnezn.
Even once Harry-potter related arguments are granted you you are left with a bunch of arguments about humans, their words, their behaviors and their motives that are objectively wrong too. The fact that their intent was interpersonal incivility does nothing to excuse the fact that the reasoning contained therein was naive, irrational and all around terrible thinking. (No, no ‘intellectual’ high ground for you. You were being all round silly.)
For this sentence. Yes.
Wait, what? I think you’re misinterpreting a lot of what I was doing. My goal isn’t incivility, my goal is getting my point across. Incivility was a means toward that goal, a means which obviously fails utterly in the context of this website. But certainly you’ll agree that since I’ve started behaving I should no longer get negative reputations, correct? Or are you going to punish me for my sins?
I’d also like to have a debate about manners somewhere else, if you’d like. I hate them and think being polite is in and of itself bad, and I also think manners are kind of oppressive, etc. For the purposes of that debate I would use manners (new means to an end).
I’m pretty sure that Nietzsche was legit, and that you shouldn’t just willy nilly call his arguments silly. He’s universally recognized as a Pretty Smart Guy. I’d be willing to have a discussion about either Nietzsche or Hume with anyone, on the condition that I don’t get bad karma’d into oblivion for disagreeing with a societal convention (ironically that this happens when I disagree with manners bolsters the strength of the argument that manners are stupid).
What arguments about humans and their behaviors and motives did I even make here? I don’t think I made any. I think you just wanted to make a list so that you could act as though that summarized everything I’ve said so that you could conclude I was wrong without actually discussing specific things that I wrote.
Specific humans, their behaviors and motives. For example accusing someone of being disingenuous hits all three checkboxes.
I think you are saying more false things about a human, his behavior and his motives.
I know a little about Nietzsche and next to nothing about Hume. Philosopher talk bores me. That is, all that ‘philosophy’ that consists of quoting historical Philosophical figures. Actual ideas are somewhat more interesting. If the big names happened to express a particular idea better than other available sources then they may be worth quoting.
I don’t think that necessarily follows, from the perspective of identifying potentially desirable game theoretic equilibria.
Hume’s problem of induction is pretty awesome, if you’re looking for specific arguments. Nietzsche is often misinterpreted, if you want to understand his ideas you should read any summaries which were written by Giles Deleuze who is another smart person.
Hume was one of the first and best naturalists and his stuff is very easy to read (unlike Kant’s stuff which is all either entirely wrong or a more confusing way of phrasing the arguments that Hume had already made). Wikipedia’s list of entries is fairly informative, many philosophers who are awesome think that Hume was really smart.
I strongly recommend Hume. Nietzsche is pretty tough to understand and he goes off into poetics too often to be easily understood, it’s a lot of work without a proportional amount of gain. But Hume was a genius and was very good at communicating. His writings are very concise and informative and will almost certainly benefit you. Treatise on Human Nature is pretty good for a starter, as is Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. They are very short books and should only take about an hour or so to read.
Enquiry is a very short book, but the Treatise is not. I certainly couldn’t read it in an hour. The edition I have is about 300 pages long. Anyway, I agree that Hume is awesome. I think, though, that most what is of greatest value in his work (empiricism, the problem of induction, instrumental rationality, ethical anti-rationalism) is probably already part of the collective memeset at LW, in more sophisticated guise. So I’m not sure it would be worth it for the average LWer without a genuine interest in the history of philosophy to work their way through Hume.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think a lot of people here could learn a lot from.
I misremembered the length of Treatise. I agree that Hume will just tell you things that you probably already know if you visit this site. So people should read Nietzsche instead. Very good point.
To people who want to read Nietzsche: note that every secondary author except Giles Deleuze is probably misinterpreting Nietzsche’s work. Also note that Giles Deleuze uses Nietzsche like a historical sock puppet so that he can get his rhizomatic message of anticapitalism across. Deleuze is the best that I’ve found, but even his stuff is very selective. I didn’t do this personally, but I’ve often heard it repeated that new readers of Nietzsche should start with The Gay Science. That might be the best place to start.
The best parts of Nietzsche are the ones that no one seems to know about. The dangers of the safety of the “Last Man” is awesome. The parts where he talks about being a lion and recreating value is awesome. All of Zarasthustra is awesome. Twilight of the Idols is hilarious at times. The “pop culture” Nietzsche is nothing like the one in his actual books.
It helps to remember that Nietzsche was basically a Christian who found out that God was dead who then got incredibly sad and nihilistic and then worked his way through it by realizing his past and current ignorance, and becoming very critical of Christian ideals and he then found new and objective ideals to work for, and became awesome. He’s anti Christian, but he doesn’t criticize literally everything about them and they share some common ground. He hates them, but he also hates his past self. He also managed to fix his past self, and his books are meant to try to fix other people as well. He does feel empathy, he’s still human.
Also, he’s not responsible for the Nazis. That was his stupid evil sister’s fault.
He hates Schopenhauer, maybe reading Schopenhauer should be done before reading Nietzsche. Not sure.
Agreed both that Hume is awesome, and that most of his valuable insights are incorporated already in our memeset. If you want a clear, easy and fast to read version of the proto-form of that memeset from 300 years ago, there is nothing better than his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Spinoza has also many early insights, complementary to Hume’s (roughly, you could say that Hume anticipates LW’s epistemology and metaethics, and Spinoza anticipates LW’s naturalistic metaphysics and computationalist philosophy of mind) but Spinoza is more difficult to read casually with profit because of his outdated terminology (e.g. “God” instead of “the Universe”) and his tiresome pretense of deducing everything from self-evident principles.
Wow. I might even read them instead of reading the Dresden Files for a 13th time. Get me some culture.
Thinking in terms of “capitulation” or similar notions of losing, winning and surrender is not helpful. One doesn’t update views as much when one feels like something is at risk of being lost. Trying not to think that way may be helpful.
The word was chosen on purpose, not to reflect my view, but to reflect the view of the hypothetical downvoters.
I’ve already read the core sequences, I don’t feel a need to oppose every argument made against what I’ve said.
Probably a good quality.
You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be.
Edited to make my intent crystal clear.
I’ll interpret this like Alicorn did, and stop responding to your comments. We do have a weak norm in favor of respecting such requests.
If you’d actually like answers to the questions you posed in the parent, please restate them in a more readable fashion and let me know you actually would like a response.
I have upvoted this comment. Even though I’m not thrilled with the way chaosmosis has been conducting emself, “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be” is a reasonable sentiment and doesn’t need to be attacked.
I read the above (grandparent) comment not as “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be”, but instead as “I can tell that everything you say is a veiled insult, everyone’s against me, I am being punished by shadowy figures, when I act poorly it’s your fault”. Am I missing something?
Mostly the context of previous interpersonal conflicts.
Ah. Well, noted! Thanks.
I would go through and elaborate on how I read it, but it’s gone now. Apparently chaosmosis endorses my interpretation, which is at least some evidence that I had it right.
Fair enough!
I downvoted the comment as a (mildly) inappropriate personal attack. It’s not all that much different in nature to other acts of social aggression against the reputation of an individual. Occasionally a context will arise where such an utterance is justified but this isn’t one of them.
Regarding the ‘leave me be’ in particular, people do not have the right to choose when others are permitted reply to public utterances—and such a power would be far too exploitable were it to be granted.
Meh.
The content of comments usually matters more than the tone because usually the tone is OK; you only “lose points” for a bad tone (which is rare), you won’t get a lot of credit here if you combine lousy arguments with a great presentation (unlike on say a TV show).
You may want to look into Crocker’s Rules, which have been invoked a few times here, and cause much less friction than your “reverse Crocker’s Rules”.
Everyone can use Crocker’s Rules on me unless I tell them to stop. Actually, everybody but thomblake, because he’s super annoying and would abuse the privilege.
I’ll be polite and say thankee sai and yes ma’am unless people tell me I’m allowed to do otherwise. That’s basically what I said above.
Do you consider my evil supervillain comments to be rude? I meant them to be a not-rude alternative for expressing my sentiments, plus for them to have a little humor also. They’ve gotten negative karma but I think that’s just from the few commenters who love thomblake.
Removed for reciprocity.
As per my standard policy I decline your invitation—because most of the social consequences for the speaker who follows said rules are not significantly influenced by the declaration.
Also, when people say “Make yourself at home” I don’t start walking around naked and eating all the food. In fact, in my typical experience when people actually say that I find that more formality and protocol is indicated than in more casual interactions where nobody considers the need.
(This isn’t a critique of your motives. It’s me expressing little faith in this particular signalling mechanism.)
I advise against inserting this into comments. I also advise against mentioning thomblake in general; you should be aiming for and holding up your end of mutual nonmention and nonreply.
Fixed. It was sarcasm, but I see your point. I’ll follow that advice in the future.
But I’m leaving the specific mention in the context of supervillains for clarification purposes.
FWIW, feel free to be as rude to me as you want; I operate by Crocker’s Rules.
That said, I feel compelled to point out that—as far as I can tell—whenever Roland says “thankee sai”, he does so not as some sort of a minimum-effort implementation of social protocols, but because he genuinely respects the person he’s thanking. That’s an admirable character trait, IMO.
I use “thankee sai” whenever possible in the hope that people will catch the reference. I agree that Roland specifically is awesome, and I respect people who are legitimately polite even if I think that being concerned about politeness is a bad thing and that insisting on politeness is usually just a different way to be rude, etc. But Roland’s pretty admirable and I thought he was genuine. He’s also inhumanely vicious in attempting to complete his quest.
How did you like the ending (if necessary use rot13)? I loved it. It’s even better in the context of the fact that the literature juvpu jnf jevggra orsberunaq nobhg puvyqr ebynaq nyy srngherq znal qvssrerag irefvbaf bs ubj ur pnzr gb gur gbjre. Nyy bs gurfr irefvbaf pna or fvzhygnarbhfyl gehr haqre Xvat’f raqvat, nygubhtu gung cebonoyl jnfa’g uvf vagrag. Ohg vg znxrf gur raqvat rira orggre.
Everyone got a good ending but Oy, who deserved better than he got.
I haven’t been able to discuss the ending because no one I know has finished the series.
I hate to disappoint you, but I am one of those people :-( I am going through the series on audiobook, which means that I make progress on it only during long trips. I was pretty disappointed by the 4th installment, Wizard and Glass, because it’s basically a giant flashback where very little actually happens, so my reading speed declined sharply after that...
Everything past the first two books is boring and kind of suckish until the very ending, IMHO. You might just want to skip to the last book after reading plot summaries of the ones you haven’t listened to yet. The ending is the best part of the entire series, hands down (except that some people hated it, I think that’s because they got emotionally invested because of Roland’s long hard journey).
The Stephen King book about Annie, an insane woman, who kidnaps a hack writer because she’s his “number one fan” is a great book. I don’t remember the title. Also, IT is one of my favorite books.
Just a note for those who might feel inclined to downvote complaints about downvotes—this is clearly a testable prediction about downvotes, which surely should be upvoted.
ETA: For those inclined to downvote discussion of voting and karma in general, I have happily provided a softer target.
“This comment will be downvoted” is a testable prediction, agreed.
”This comment will be downvoted because it’s not a capitulation” is not a testable prediction.
Regardless of its testability, it is also an attempt to impose a specific interpretation on all downvotes. It asserts that my downvote is an expression of the desire for chaosmosis to capitulate, rather than an expression of the desire to have fewer comments like his on LW.
I jumped through hoops for you and acted politely, why would you do this?
Are you just a jerk?
(See how I’m still jumping through hoops and didn’t swear at you despite your obvious jerkishness, and also see how I lured you in with my Xanatos Gambit? Mwhahahaha! Evil triumphs again, you poor pitiful fool.)
I’m confused. What did I do that was jerklike? I was under the impression that you disliked downvotes, and my comment’s intent was to dispel a source of confusion that would cause some people to erroneously downvote your comment.
Several people (myself included) do tend to downvote comments for whining about downvotes.
lol
Your words would deceive only the feeblest of minds. The denizens of this site are not to be fooled so easily.
Every attack you make only serves to strengthen my ultimate power.
Xanatos shall not be denied.
Your doom approaches.
Edit: apparently the denizens are less clever than I thought.
Then expect to be downvoted—anyone else being rude to you will be downvoted as well (not necessarily on net).
Leaving aside the common “people are disagreeing with me” interpretation, I still don’t think that’s what people (non-technically) mean when they use the word “groupthink”. “Groupthink” (in the popular usage) implies that there are beliefs common to the group that are not questioned—for example, accusing Less Wrong of “groupthink” because a comment against cryonics was highly criticized would be the common usage.
Really, it should not be used that way either though, since it’s too similar to the technical meaning of the term but entirely wrong.
No, I was not confused about what you meant—I was pointing out how it was not obvious. If you say “Obviously X” and I think X is also obvious to me, then I still might have grounds for arguing that X is not obvious in general. In fact, unless you’re talking about something like the color of an object that a particular group of people are currently staring at, it’s best to assume that nothing is obvious. If you do use the word “obvious”, you should expect objections from people who did not find it obvious, and expect some of them to feel that you are insulting their intelligence.
I do not see how I was playing with semantics. Yes, I take what you write literally. If you do not want me to read the words that you write, then do not write them on this website, as I will probably get around to reading all of them eventually.
Usually, “if my comment was wrong” refers to its factual accuracy, not the quality of your reasoning. So following an accusation of overconfidence with “that would only make sense if my comment was wrong” is misleading.
I’m familiar with that effect, but I don’t see how it’s a response to either of my statements.
Well I, for one, did not read or downvote anything you said in that other thread until I read this one. Now I’ve gone back and downvoted all the low-quality comments you made in that thread (note: that is not all of your comments).
There are more constructive things to call that behavior other than “stupid”. And I’d like to know how you know that’s what people are doing—I have no tools that let me detect that, and looking back at your comment history you have some recent comments that are not at a net negative.
I’m done protecting the theory. I don’t have the time to argue with this many different people.
If I haven’t convinced you yet then it’s either impossible because I’m wrong or impossible because you don’t want to understand or you’re lying. I don’t much care either way, because I don’t believe that any reasonable observer would conclude that the remaining objections to what I’ve been saying are actually important. I believe that I’ve done enough to convince someone who is actually interested in knowing what happened, and that I can never convince anyone if the amount of work I’ve done so far isn’t enough.
If you have future interactions on this site, please try to avoid “convincing” as a primary goal. This is not debate club.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem
You’ve been willfully ignorant and willfully misinterpreted me, and your disdain for debate and your rejection of “convincing” because it’s apparently associated with debate is incredibly stupid. You are acting like an idiot. If convincing shouldn’t be my primary goal, then I should stop this conversation. Your own “objection” would support my point if you thought through what you were saying and what I said. You’re clearly not concerned with doing that, however. The fact that I’m dealing with so many people who don’t bother to answer their own questions or to consider arguments before making them is the very reason that I won’t be wasting anymore time on defending my theory. You obviously aren’t interested in predicting what will or what has happened so much as you are interested in attacking me, hence the useless comment you just made.
Either you are being irrational or Aumann is wrong, given his qualifications and your above fallacies I would bet it’s the former. Please stop being stupid.
Please stop being rude.
Note: we have community norms against exactly one of these.
Only one?
I’ve seen plenty of upvoted comments along the lines of “I’m not very smart (score below 100 on IQ tests) but want to understand this point—can someone explain it more simply?”. Stupidity is not punished, though it’s possible that many of its effects are.
Good point. I was equivocating technical stupid (scores low on IQ test) with colloquial/slangy stupid (not putting a lot of mental effort into comments, irrational, and/ or obtuse).
Where?
In my head. I haven’t commented upthread of here. Sorry for any confusion.
Note:
;
You have a bad model of me.
Aumann’s Agreement Theorem only applies to perfectly rational agents in particular idealized circumstances, as much as it’s used colloquially hereabouts as though it says anything about humans.
And yes, I’m being massively irrational. I am a human. You are also being massively irrational. If you have figured out how to stop doing that, then please let us know.
I did not see any fallacies. Given that I am an expert on logic, I expect that you’re just using the word wrong.
I’m still unsure what you mean by “stupid” on the object level.
For humans, being in debate-mode tends to be a bad idea with respect to truth-seeking. Once you start arguing for a position, it is very difficult to update your beliefs on new evidence.
If you have evidence, state your evidence, update on the evidence presented by others, and everybody wins. Entering into debate-mode or being rude is a great way to discourage rationality in both yourself and any respondents.
“If you have evidence, state your evidence, update on the evidence presented by others, and everybody wins.”
The people who downvote the evidence win more.
In the spoiler problem from a while ago, someone else linked to an example conversation purporting to demonstrate why the policy was a good idea. I demonstrated that it was impossible, once the user had asked his question, for the conversation to have ended without causing the alleged harm done by revealing the spoiler. Someone responded by telling me that it’s not up for discussion and no-one except Eliezer is allowed to have an opinion on whether it is a good or effective policy.
To clarify, I don’t think this, and you are of course allowed to have an opinion (as long as you’ve filled out the proper paperwork). I just meant that he has veto power. (Also, I was rather frustrated with the conversation at that point. Sorry.)
I don’t believe you.
I dispute the accuracy of that summary, but I suppose it’s possible Random832 got that impression from the conversation starting here.
Ah, I could see someone making that interpretation.
To quote, add a single greater-than sign (>) before the quote.
You are clearly already in debate mode and you have been for quite a while.
Stop.
I’m confused. I’m curious.
Can you see his point of view?
Do you understand why people (me included) feel that you under-clarify your arguments?
Do you realise that we (me, and I guess thornblake as well) do not mean you any harm? That harming you could not possibly help us (sorry, it could, marginally so, if it actually had a behavioural impact)?
Furthermore, it is hard to get social benefits from downvoting, since others can’t see anyone downvote you. This does NOT have the same social effect as denouncing something in public.