Early stage votes are pretty noisy (and I think have been getting noisier over time, which is somewhat of a proxy of polarization, which makes me sad).
By the way, is there a principled [1] reason why LW doesn’t have agree/disagree votes on posts? I think this post would be a prime example of something users here might want to upvote + disagree-vote.
There seem to have been a lot of requests (1, 2, 3, 4, etc) from users for this feature over the past year or so. Raemon has mentioned a benefit of this in the past, and you yourself have extolled the benefits of agree/disagree voting for a long time.
Yeah, the principled reason (though I am not like super confident of this) is that posts are almost always too big and have too many claims in them to make a single agree/disagree vote make sense. Inline reacts are the intended way for people to express agreement and disagreement on posts.
I am not super sure this is right, but I do want to avoid agreement/disagreement becoming disconnected from truth values, and I think applying them to elements that clearly don’t have a single truth value weakens that connection.
It makes me happy to see you say polarization makes you sad. Sorry :) I agree that it’s all too easy to lose rational discussion to polarization, and I live in fear of seeing LessWrong and the alignment community become polarized.
Your point about them not fully making sense makes sense. But despite that, I think agree/disagree votes on posts might help prevent that from happening. Receiving a large downvote on a high-effort or dearly-valued post is emotionally painful, and creates a bit of hostility/negative emotion toward the downvoter. Since you don’t know who it was, you wind up thinking of it as “the opposition to my position”. This hostility tempts you to downvote high effort or dearly valued posts stating similar opposing views. Now they’re irritated/hostile back. Polarization results. Even if that polarization is on specific issues rather than lumping many views together, it’s almost as bad.
It looks to me like agree/disagree on comments serves remarkably well to allow people to express agreement or disagreement with what they perceive as the main point, while still acknowledging the effort someone put into clarifying and arguing for that point. Many comments also make multiple points, so you’re guessing at what each agree vote really means, and that’s okay. It still serves the important purpose of keeping upvote/downvate from being used for agree/disagree. I think people are often posts voting post as agree or disagree rather than their contribution to the conversation. If you’re quite sure a post is wrong in its main point, you might argue that it’s not contributing to our collective knowledge but instead confusing it. And it’s attractive to register your opinion of agreeing without writing a comment just to say “yeah”. But we don’t want to be voting on the truth (in most cases wehre it’s not clear cut), but rather discussing it, and awarding congratulations (upvotes) for people that are trying to advance the discussion, even when their logic or their methods happen to be partly mistaken.
Alright, this makes sense. I will say, though, that at least in my experience on this site, inline reacts seem to be used much more often in comments than they are in posts, even though comments have agree/disagree voting enabled. And, at least for me, using them in posts just kind of feels… weird, clunky? compared to using them in comments. I don’t really know the right word for it, it just feels aesthetically off for reasons I can’t quite explain.
I could, of course, simply be wrong about the factual claim here.
Yeah, I am not super happy with the UI for inline reacts in posts, both for reading and for writing them. It’s been on my to-do list for a while to improve them.
The inline reactions are totally different in that they de-anonymize your feedback. It’s both rational and emotionally instinctive to not want someone irritated at you specifically because you disagree with them. In comments you can at least try to be extra nice and appreciative when you express disagreement to offset that downside. But that’s a lot more work than clicking a button. I think that’s sometimes why the anonymous big downvote is used. It takes real thought and discipline to reserve it for fair, rational “the discussion would be much better if you hadn’t written this” responses. And I’m not sure how many people even try to do that.
Early stage votes are pretty noisy (and I think have been getting noisier over time, which is somewhat of a proxy of polarization, which makes me sad).
By the way, is there a principled [1] reason why LW doesn’t have agree/disagree votes on posts? I think this post would be a prime example of something users here might want to upvote + disagree-vote.
There seem to have been a lot of requests (1, 2, 3, 4, etc) from users for this feature over the past year or so. Raemon has mentioned a benefit of this in the past, and you yourself have extolled the benefits of agree/disagree voting for a long time.
As in, not related to implementation details or the LW team not having had time to deal with this, etc.
Yeah, the principled reason (though I am not like super confident of this) is that posts are almost always too big and have too many claims in them to make a single agree/disagree vote make sense. Inline reacts are the intended way for people to express agreement and disagreement on posts.
I am not super sure this is right, but I do want to avoid agreement/disagreement becoming disconnected from truth values, and I think applying them to elements that clearly don’t have a single truth value weakens that connection.
It makes me happy to see you say polarization makes you sad. Sorry :) I agree that it’s all too easy to lose rational discussion to polarization, and I live in fear of seeing LessWrong and the alignment community become polarized.
Your point about them not fully making sense makes sense. But despite that, I think agree/disagree votes on posts might help prevent that from happening. Receiving a large downvote on a high-effort or dearly-valued post is emotionally painful, and creates a bit of hostility/negative emotion toward the downvoter. Since you don’t know who it was, you wind up thinking of it as “the opposition to my position”. This hostility tempts you to downvote high effort or dearly valued posts stating similar opposing views. Now they’re irritated/hostile back. Polarization results. Even if that polarization is on specific issues rather than lumping many views together, it’s almost as bad.
It looks to me like agree/disagree on comments serves remarkably well to allow people to express agreement or disagreement with what they perceive as the main point, while still acknowledging the effort someone put into clarifying and arguing for that point. Many comments also make multiple points, so you’re guessing at what each agree vote really means, and that’s okay. It still serves the important purpose of keeping upvote/downvate from being used for agree/disagree. I think people are often posts voting post as agree or disagree rather than their contribution to the conversation. If you’re quite sure a post is wrong in its main point, you might argue that it’s not contributing to our collective knowledge but instead confusing it. And it’s attractive to register your opinion of agreeing without writing a comment just to say “yeah”. But we don’t want to be voting on the truth (in most cases wehre it’s not clear cut), but rather discussing it, and awarding congratulations (upvotes) for people that are trying to advance the discussion, even when their logic or their methods happen to be partly mistaken.
Alright, this makes sense. I will say, though, that at least in my experience on this site, inline reacts seem to be used much more often in comments than they are in posts, even though comments have agree/disagree voting enabled. And, at least for me, using them in posts just kind of feels… weird, clunky? compared to using them in comments. I don’t really know the right word for it, it just feels aesthetically off for reasons I can’t quite explain.
I could, of course, simply be wrong about the factual claim here.
Yeah, I am not super happy with the UI for inline reacts in posts, both for reading and for writing them. It’s been on my to-do list for a while to improve them.
The inline reactions are totally different in that they de-anonymize your feedback. It’s both rational and emotionally instinctive to not want someone irritated at you specifically because you disagree with them. In comments you can at least try to be extra nice and appreciative when you express disagreement to offset that downside. But that’s a lot more work than clicking a button. I think that’s sometimes why the anonymous big downvote is used. It takes real thought and discipline to reserve it for fair, rational “the discussion would be much better if you hadn’t written this” responses. And I’m not sure how many people even try to do that.