To generalize that, I’ve found in the past that posts on subjects I feel very strongly about, or that I might reasonably expect interested observers to feel very strongly about, tend to be noticeably less well received unless I put a lot of effort into cooling my phrasing and shoring up any weak points in the reasoning. This might have a little to do with inferential gaps, but it’s probably driven mostly by halo effects and their negative-affect cognates: arguments that I’ve accepted as part of my worldview are likely to look a lot less good to people that haven’t internalized them. Same goes for rhetoric, but moreso.
Some people seem to be able to avoid this, but I don’t seem to have the entertaining rant patch installed. If you find your posts on these subjects being downvoted a lot, chances are you don’t either.
That makes some sense to me. Polyamory is exceptional because a number of prominent folks on Less Wrong identify as themselves poly, so they’re bound to take it personally. And maybe I take it too personally myself, having been burned by a few attempts at poly relationships that went badly.
If so, then we would all be expected to be making worse arguments than usual, and you can get caught in a death spiral of both sides taking it too personally.
To generalize that, I’ve found in the past that posts on subjects I feel very strongly about, or that I might reasonably expect interested observers to feel very strongly about, tend to be noticeably less well received unless I put a lot of effort into cooling my phrasing and shoring up any weak points in the reasoning. This might have a little to do with inferential gaps, but it’s probably driven mostly by halo effects and their negative-affect cognates: arguments that I’ve accepted as part of my worldview are likely to look a lot less good to people that haven’t internalized them. Same goes for rhetoric, but moreso.
Some people seem to be able to avoid this, but I don’t seem to have the entertaining rant patch installed. If you find your posts on these subjects being downvoted a lot, chances are you don’t either.
That makes some sense to me. Polyamory is exceptional because a number of prominent folks on Less Wrong identify as themselves poly, so they’re bound to take it personally. And maybe I take it too personally myself, having been burned by a few attempts at poly relationships that went badly.
If so, then we would all be expected to be making worse arguments than usual, and you can get caught in a death spiral of both sides taking it too personally.