It’s not possible to take the downvotes as a signal of this if downvotes get used for a wide range of things.
Perhaps not in general, but I think it’s often pretty clear. Like you’ve already said “I’m guessing the intention was to punish me for not caring”, and yes, I think you’re right. Seems to me the signal was recieved as intended.
Although if the person disagrees with whether it was bad, and the answer to that disagreement is to try to silence them… then that seems to me like a pretty anti-epistemic norm. At least locally.
Well, if someone comes here arguing for flat-earthism, I’m probably going to downvote without bothering to read their arguments. Is that anti-epistemic? Maybe, I guess? Certainly yes, if it turns out that the earth is flat (and that their arguments are correct). And “this practice isn’t anti-epistemic as long as we only dismiss false ideas” is, um. Nevertheless, I endorse that practice.
If someone comes around here calling people names, and we downvote that rather than checking in “hey are you doing this because you think name calling is good actually? Would you like to dialogue about that?” is that anti-epistemic? Again, maybe yes? But I endorse it anyway.
The dynamic would be pretty simple:
After I downvote, I skim the replies to see if someone else already explained what had me do the downvote. If so, I upvote that explanation and agree-vote it too.
If there’s no such explanation, I write one.
Easy peasy.
I do not consider writing these explanations to be easy.
I seriously doubt the number of things needing downvotes on this site is so utterly overwhelming that this approach is untenable.
I can think of a few places we might disagree here: how many things deserve downvotes, how costly it is to explain them, how realistic it is for people to pay those costs. I’m not super enthusiastic about trying to drill down into this, though.
But I also think I’m less optimistic than you about the benefits of doing it. I can think of multiple conversations I’ve had where I wanted people to change what they’re doing, I explained why I thought they were doing something bad, and they just keep on doing it. You yourself seem to understand what it is that many people dislike in many of your posts and comments, and yet you keep doing the thing. Surely there are cases where it does help, but I think they’re a minority. (It seems plausible to me that the helpful cases actually do get explained more often than others. E.g. if someone explicitly asks why they’re getting downvoted, that’s evidence they’re interested in improving, and also it makes them more likely to get an explanation.)
Another thing worth mentioning is that reacts reduce the cost of explaining downvotes. I dunno how much they’re used, since I mostly use GreaterWrong which doesn’t (yet?) support them. I believe they were only added to this post later, so they wouldn’t have been helpful at the time. But yeah, if a comment gets downvoted a bunch with not even any reacts explaining why, that seems not ideal.
Perhaps not in general, but I think it’s often pretty clear. Like you’ve already said “I’m guessing the intention was to punish me for not caring”, and yes, I think you’re right. Seems to me the signal was recieved as intended.
Well, if someone comes here arguing for flat-earthism, I’m probably going to downvote without bothering to read their arguments. Is that anti-epistemic? Maybe, I guess? Certainly yes, if it turns out that the earth is flat (and that their arguments are correct). And “this practice isn’t anti-epistemic as long as we only dismiss false ideas” is, um. Nevertheless, I endorse that practice.
If someone comes around here calling people names, and we downvote that rather than checking in “hey are you doing this because you think name calling is good actually? Would you like to dialogue about that?” is that anti-epistemic? Again, maybe yes? But I endorse it anyway.
I do not consider writing these explanations to be easy.
I can think of a few places we might disagree here: how many things deserve downvotes, how costly it is to explain them, how realistic it is for people to pay those costs. I’m not super enthusiastic about trying to drill down into this, though.
But I also think I’m less optimistic than you about the benefits of doing it. I can think of multiple conversations I’ve had where I wanted people to change what they’re doing, I explained why I thought they were doing something bad, and they just keep on doing it. You yourself seem to understand what it is that many people dislike in many of your posts and comments, and yet you keep doing the thing. Surely there are cases where it does help, but I think they’re a minority. (It seems plausible to me that the helpful cases actually do get explained more often than others. E.g. if someone explicitly asks why they’re getting downvoted, that’s evidence they’re interested in improving, and also it makes them more likely to get an explanation.)
Another thing worth mentioning is that reacts reduce the cost of explaining downvotes. I dunno how much they’re used, since I mostly use GreaterWrong which doesn’t (yet?) support them. I believe they were only added to this post later, so they wouldn’t have been helpful at the time. But yeah, if a comment gets downvoted a bunch with not even any reacts explaining why, that seems not ideal.