I agree with you about the roughness and changeability of karma. My main issue with it—particularly with downvotes and on this specific topic—is that it is too effective at silencing, while being too frustration, for too little informational gain. Even that wouldn’t be too big a deal because it does offer benefits and is an attractively simple solution for drawing on crowd wisdom.
Where the difficulty lies, I think, is when requesting advice about infohazards is met with negative vibes—frowns and sternness in real life, or downvotes online—without useful explicit feedback about the question at hand. That does a disservice to both the person asking for advice and to the people who think infohazards are worth taking seriously. I think that advocating for a change of vibes is better than putting up with inappropriate vibes, which is partly why I chose not to just put up with a few random downvotes and instead spoke up about it.
I don’t think I downvoted the advice post, but I do recall that I skimmed it and decided I don’t have much to say about it. I’m probably guilty of making that face when someone brings up the word “infohazard” in real life—I don’t think it’s a very useful generalization for most things. I don’t know how representative I am, and it seemed a good-faith discussion, so I left it alone.
IMO, “infohazard” is the kind of term that aggregates a number of distinct things in such a way as to make the speaker sound erudite, rather than to illuminate any aspect of the topic. It’s also almost always about fear of others’ freedom or abilities, not about the information itself.
I agree with you about the roughness and changeability of karma. My main issue with it—particularly with downvotes and on this specific topic—is that it is too effective at silencing, while being too frustration, for too little informational gain. Even that wouldn’t be too big a deal because it does offer benefits and is an attractively simple solution for drawing on crowd wisdom.
Where the difficulty lies, I think, is when requesting advice about infohazards is met with negative vibes—frowns and sternness in real life, or downvotes online—without useful explicit feedback about the question at hand. That does a disservice to both the person asking for advice and to the people who think infohazards are worth taking seriously. I think that advocating for a change of vibes is better than putting up with inappropriate vibes, which is partly why I chose not to just put up with a few random downvotes and instead spoke up about it.
I don’t think I downvoted the advice post, but I do recall that I skimmed it and decided I don’t have much to say about it. I’m probably guilty of making that face when someone brings up the word “infohazard” in real life—I don’t think it’s a very useful generalization for most things. I don’t know how representative I am, and it seemed a good-faith discussion, so I left it alone.
IMO, “infohazard” is the kind of term that aggregates a number of distinct things in such a way as to make the speaker sound erudite, rather than to illuminate any aspect of the topic. It’s also almost always about fear of others’ freedom or abilities, not about the information itself.