As another random guy on the internet, I find Wei Dai’s comments and posts interesting and important and I don’t refrain from upvoting them.
One excuse you can use to give yourself permission to upvote what looks good to you is that even if you’re wrong, you’ll at least have given increased visibility to a viewpoint that is attractive but needs correcting. I think of my upvotes as not necessarily saying, “I endorse this as correct and the final word on the matter,” but rather, “this seems like a good point and if it’s wrong I’d like someone to explain why.”
As someone who tends towards wanting to provide such explanations, even as the Devil’s advocate, I feel that a significant amount of upvotes makes a reply more “dangerous” to attempt to dismantle in terms of the potential for downvotes received. For example: I feel at though your opinion is widely held and there is a significant potential for my current comment to be downvoted. I may be wrong, but I feel as though the perception that my perception is incorrect itself will tend towards a downvoting, even in the presence of such an explanation written for the very purpose of trying to disable that memetic response. I can easily see a potential for openly challenging the meme to increase the downvote potential of my post, and I suspect that the irony of having predicted well will not be apparent until my comment has already received a significant ratio of downvotes. The logic as I understand it is that this will be interpreted as a plea to not be downvoted, resulting in an aggressive attitude extremely suggestive of being downvoted.
My the same metric, if my present comment does not receive the quality of downvotes I predict, then my analysis is shown to be effectively “wrong.” I now have the choice to backspace and avoid the conflict, but I have talked myself into an intense curiosity about the result of this experiment.
Reviewing now, I place a high probability on a general apathy towards deconstructing any part of this message.
As another random guy on the internet, I find Wei Dai’s comments and posts interesting and important and I don’t refrain from upvoting them.
One excuse you can use to give yourself permission to upvote what looks good to you is that even if you’re wrong, you’ll at least have given increased visibility to a viewpoint that is attractive but needs correcting. I think of my upvotes as not necessarily saying, “I endorse this as correct and the final word on the matter,” but rather, “this seems like a good point and if it’s wrong I’d like someone to explain why.”
As someone who tends towards wanting to provide such explanations, even as the Devil’s advocate, I feel that a significant amount of upvotes makes a reply more “dangerous” to attempt to dismantle in terms of the potential for downvotes received. For example: I feel at though your opinion is widely held and there is a significant potential for my current comment to be downvoted. I may be wrong, but I feel as though the perception that my perception is incorrect itself will tend towards a downvoting, even in the presence of such an explanation written for the very purpose of trying to disable that memetic response. I can easily see a potential for openly challenging the meme to increase the downvote potential of my post, and I suspect that the irony of having predicted well will not be apparent until my comment has already received a significant ratio of downvotes. The logic as I understand it is that this will be interpreted as a plea to not be downvoted, resulting in an aggressive attitude extremely suggestive of being downvoted.
My the same metric, if my present comment does not receive the quality of downvotes I predict, then my analysis is shown to be effectively “wrong.” I now have the choice to backspace and avoid the conflict, but I have talked myself into an intense curiosity about the result of this experiment.
Reviewing now, I place a high probability on a general apathy towards deconstructing any part of this message.