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.
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.