Without voting, how would you propose that users share metadata about which content is factually accurate/inaccurate, “objectively” true/false arguments, or just unusually worth reading for people like themselves? One of the major advantages of forums is that they allow users to filter which information is likeliest to be relevant or helpful to others, rather than forcing every user to read and evaluate every post.
Sometimes when a system propagates prejudice, it can be a win to discard the system entirely. Consider the end of segregation in the US, as a minimally controversial example—by abolishing an unfixably prejudiced system, much was gained and nothing worth keeping was lost.
But many times, it would be a net loss to completely throw out a prejudiced system rather than fixing the prejudice within it. A clear example of such a system in the real world is western medicine: It contains some bias and prejudice. Patients of certain appearances in certain regions get measurably worse medical care than people of other appearances in the same region. But the presence of bias isn’t a compelling argument to abolish the whole institution of medicine, because the drawbacks of doing so would vastly outweigh any benefits of “now everybody gets the worst treatment”.
I’d contend that forum voting is in the latter category: Readers derive so much benefit from having help in choosing which content is most engaging, accurate, relevant, and timely that scrapping the whole system due to the possibility of bias would eliminate many of the reasons that people bother using forums at all. (perhaps we disagree on why forums are useful or desirable to engage with?)
What might addressing bias problems look like on a forum where “a person might make an objectively true argument but gets downvoted because of prejudice against the arguer”? I think that online forums offer a unique opportunity for arguers to sidestep any prejudice that they might experience elsewhere. Authors have absolute control over which forums they choose to post to, what username they choose to post under, and what tone and examples they choose to use in their posts. This allows posts to be evaluated on a combination of their logical merits and the cleverness of the author in cleansing them of prejudice-relevant content, rather than on factors outside the author’s control that inevitably color conversations in person or even over audio or video media. If an argument gets downvoted because of “prejudice”, the author has a trivially easy recourse: they can strip the content or context which invoked the prejudice (possibly by changing their wording or their account, possibly by going to a different forum) and try again, to see whether the negative reaction was actually due to the prejudice they assumed, or perhaps could be due to having a less sound logical argument or worse relevance to the audience than they’d initially assumed.
Imagine this as an IRL version.
IRL, people who frequently say useful and novel things about their field often become recognized as authorities, and are more likely to have a wider platform of listeners. People who frequently say things that directly disadvantage their listeners are often written off as crackpots and ignored. Sure, a given speaker can be regarded as an authority by one group and a crackpot by another if the groups have enough variation in their utility functions, but that’s to be expected.
I agree with the overall sentiment, yet there is no forum system that I’m aware of where it ensures that people have to vote on objectivity.
I do not like your statement, so I will downvote it. My downvote does not have to be reasoned or explained.
You described it nicely in the IRL version with the crackpot. One group of people concludes that the person is speaking the truth and is objectively correct. The other sees them as a crackpot because of their personal beliefs. In a forum, the second group has the power to downvote.
”a person might make an objectively true argument but gets downvoted because of prejudice against the arguer” was not formulated well ”a person might make an objectively true argument but gets downvoted because of personal beliefs of the reader”
″Without voting, how would you propose that users share metadata about which content is factually accurate/inaccurate, “objectively” true/false arguments, or just unusually worth reading for people like themselves?”
random people on the internet sure are not the group of people fit for this, especially when voting takes no time or reasoning and nobody checks if it is correct or wrong.
Thanks, that helps me understand where you’re coming from.
I do not like your statement, so I will downvote it. My downvote does not have to be reasoned or explained.
From your downvote, I learn that I presented my ideas in a way which decreased your likelihood of coming to agree with me. I can use that information to change how I present my ideas in the future if I want them to have a higher likelihood of influencing you.
“a person might make an objectively true argument but gets downvoted because of personal beliefs of the reader”
I agree that downvotes often represent personal beliefs. However, personal beliefs tend to come from experiences, and forums tend to attempt to attract groups of people with particular shared beliefs or experiences. In as much as any argument can be “objectively true”, not all true arguments are useful to a particular group, and belief-based downvoting of technically-true ideas often expresses the opinion that the ideas are not useful in the forum’s context.
If you believe there’s a benefit to having separate forums for separate topics, true-but-not-useful is an argument for how users can keep forums on-topic. If you do not believe there’s a benefit to having separate topical forums, and instead think there should only be a single forum for all conversation, true-but-not-useful downvoting in such a forum would be an antipattern since almost any truth has the potential to be useful to somebody.
random people on the internet sure are not the group of people fit for [sharing metadata about which content is… worth reading for people like themselves], especially when voting takes no time or reasoning and nobody checks if it is correct or wrong.
If each forum was populated by a truly random group of people, I would agree entirely with this claim. However, I don’t believe that internet forums attract random groups. Instead, I believe that each forum attracts a group with some interest in its primary topic, and over time develops social norms that reward producing content which is particularly useful to that group. I see upvotes and downvotes as also participating in that social reward system whereby a group chooses how it wants its content to differ from randomness.
again this all loops around to trusting a group of people to vote correctly.
How you define the group of people and what is correct is irrelevant.
I can agree that there should be sites where you can share things you like purely based on beliefs and personal opinions of you and a group of people. For a forum aimed at objective discussion, voting is counterproductive, at least in the way voting is implemented in any forum nowadays.
Aim for rational reasoning and truth, yet anybody can vote based on personal beliefs and emotions to bury the truth.
And again, downvoting to keep objectively bad content away like a post that is not fitting for the category would be reasonable yet no voting system reflects that.
again this all loops around to trusting a group of people to vote correctly.
How you define the group of people and what is correct is irrelevant.
Huh? I think the definitions of the group and of correctness are extremely relevant.
For instance, I was on a forum for learning Chinese (a topic about which I know almost nothing), you could absolutely not trust me to vote “correctly” on a post claiming that a particular character represents a particular word. There’s a “correct” answer for that question, in that most Chinese speakers will say that the character either does or doesn’t approximate the word, but due to my membership in the group of “people who speak no Chinese whatsoever”, I am fundamentally unqualified to be voting on such a topic.
If the definitions of the group and correctness were truly irrelevant, this single case of my being unqualified to vote would prove I was never to be trusted to vote correctly. However, if I was on a forum more germane to my local area or fields of study, my votes would become more useful. For instance, if a commenter insisted that no algorithm could ever sort a list of integers faster than O(n^2), I could not only give them a “correct” downvote but also introduce them to radix sort in the comments. I can only vote correctly on that topic because I’m in the group of people who have picked up some CS education.
Aim for rational reasoning and truth, yet anybody can vote based on personal beliefs and emotions to bury the truth.
“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be” doesn’t guarantee that the destruction will be easy, or that all presentations of a given truth will be equally effective at destroying what they can.
To propagate through society, a piece of truth must be presented in a way which destroys or evades common resistances to it. If a forum chose to coddle every post with a bit of truth in it, even those presented in ways which deter the audience from considering them, it would doom those truths to never leave its own echo chamber. One essential function of a forum whose goal is not only to find truths but also to encourage the rest of the world to do so is to refine the technology of presenting truths in ways that make them easier for people to use. From this perspective, merely being accurate doesn’t justify promoting a truth—a truth can only accomplish its goals if it’s also presented in a way that allows people to understand and use it.
So, if a truth is packaged in a way that causes even rationality-inclined readers to reflexively downvote it based on their beliefs and emotions, that particular presentation of the truth is extremely unlikely to be worth sharing. Decouple the effectiveness of a truth’s packaging from the accuracy of the truth itself, and downvotes start to look like criticism of the presentation rather than of its contents (because with bad enough presentation, readers likely couldn’t get at the contents at all). Offering a truth in a really bad presentation is not unlike a chef serving customers dinner in a steel box that’s welded shut—customers will leave poor reviews (or forum users will downvote) regardless of how good the food or the truth was, because the presentation prevented them from ever getting to it.
it does not matter what scenarios you bring up, an upvote or downvote has no reasoning.
Sure people might use it to categorize a false claim as bad which would be helpful.
But people can also use it to downvote based on their personal beliefs.
You can not prove either. Anybody can make a vote for any reason that the person has.
you can not prove if a vote has a beneficial effect or a negative one.
I can take 10 of my friends and downvote every one of your new posts and nobody will ever see them again.
A vote is anonymous, available to everybody, and can be done with good or bad intentions. So it comes down to who does the voting.
And nobody controls who votes. It is a random group of people. And a random group of people never votes correctly.
For instance, I was on a forum for learning Chinese (a topic about which I know almost nothing), you could absolutely not trust me to vote “correctly” on a post claiming that a particular character represents a particular word. There’s a “correct” answer for that question, in that most Chinese speakers will say that the character either does or doesn’t approximate the word, but due to my membership in the group of “people who speak no Chinese whatsoever”, I am fundamentally unqualified to be voting on such a topic.
nobody controls who votes. I can go to the Chinese forum and vote wrongly.
If the definitions of the group and correctness were truly irrelevant, this single case of my being unqualified to vote would prove I was never to be trusted to vote correctly.
the whole point is that in a vote nothing is proven or not. Nobody knows if you are qualified or not. Nobody knows if the vote you gave is justified by reasoning or not.
All the problems you outline can be solved but not through a voting system as they are implemented currently. The voting systems as they are now are rather bad at solving the challenges you outline and in addition foster censorship.
If anything your arguments are more proof of why current voting systems are bad. Why do you trust a random group of people to decide what is a good presentation and what not? How do you know that they vote based on the presentation and not just because they do like the topic because it is against their personal beliefs?
it does not matter what scenarios you bring up, an upvote or downvote has no reasoning.
Anybody can make a vote for any reason that the person has.
No reason, or any reason? These two statements seem to contradict one another?
So it comes down to who does the voting.
I agree! That’s why forums with critical mass of people who prefer to vote based on certain values are considered so enjoyable by some of us.
And nobody controls who votes.
No one person controls who votes; that would be censorship. What controls who votes on a given forum is a complex social dynamic of who finds that forum a rewarding place to hang out, and upvotes are part of that social reward system among their other functions.
I can take 10 of my friends and downvote every one of your new posts and nobody will ever see them again.
Sure, and then I could get some friends to vote them back up, or just ditch this alias and come back with a different name if I wanted the ideas to be seen. That’s the nice thing about being on the internet.
Why do you trust a random group of people to decide what is a good presentation and what not? How do you know that they vote based on the presentation and not just because they do like the topic because it is against their personal beliefs?
I trust groups to have inertia. For instance, I trust the LessWrong crowd to give far more upvotes to a post about AI than a post about what species of edible dahlias are best suited to zone 9a (even if the gardening post has better data behind it), but there are other forums where the opposite would be the case. People who like the group’s inertia tend to add to it, and people who find it intolerable tend to leave.
I think people do vote based on factors including liking the topic, liking the presentation, or the post’s agreement with their personal beliefs! I think the point of forums is to find a bunch of people whose interests align well enough with yours that their enjoyment of a particular post is a good predictor of your enjoyment of it.
If you want forum software where every vote has to be annotated with a logical proof of why it was given, nobody’s stopping you from building it.
No reason, or any reason? These two statements seem to contradict one another?
no reasoning as in people do not have to lay out a logical proof why it was given. any reason as in people vote based on emotions not just objectivity
still, it comes down to you thinking and hoping that everybody is nice. Which is a flaw. You have no argument against my statement other than “it is probably not that bad because people are nice, I think”
which is not an argument and has nothing to do with objectivity.
Ah yes, I love that usual “argument”: ”why don’t you do it better?” “nobody is stopping you from doing it yourself” “if you think it is bad you have to bring up ways to make it better”
completely irrelevant to discuss a critique. I’m pretty sure there is a name for such replies but I don’t remember it.
“it is probably not that bad because people are nice, I think”
Where have I claimed that everyone was nice? To phrase my argument about how forums work in terms of niceness, it would be:
All individuals are nice in some ways and non-nice in others. When a forum lets people be nice to content they like, and mean to content they dislike, it causes the content on that forum to take on characteristics that reflect the characteristics of the group. People tend to be nice to content which is useful to them or makes them feel good, and mean to content which wastes their time or makes them feel bad. This means that by finding forums populated by voters who are similar to me in a relevant way, their votes can make me more likely to see content which is useful to me or makes me feel good,and less likely to see content which wastes my time or makes me feel bad.
I specifically desire to participate in forums where people who create content I’d find useless or time-wasting are downvoted! “false” and “incorrectly reasoned” are subsets of useless content, but they are not the only useless content that I prefer to avoid.
And if I wish to see exactly how a community votes in order to decide whether to engage with it, I can simply sort the content by lowest scoring, and if there’s stuff in there that I think shouldn’t have been downvoted so badly, I can choose to go converse on a different forum with a voting style more consistent with my values.
if you think it is bad you have to bring up ways to make it better
The only way to prove conclusively that something could be improved upon is to suggest an improvement.
I could critique breathing by saying it’s a bad idea because breathing pollutants is a common cause of sickness. But considering that breathing is so much better than not breathing at all, my critique would be useless unless I could suggest some alternative. I could suggest some alternative, like hooking ourselves up to blood-oxygenating machines instead of breathing, and then we could have an interesting conversation about whether that would actually be better. But without a suggestion, it’s not a critique at all, it’s just whining.
Or I could say it’d be better if we all learned to levitate and floated around instead of walking, because we wouldn’t have to wear shoes. Sure, levitating would be neat, but I’d be wasting time speculating about it unless I could suggest how to do it. Similarly, having a forum where votes had to be proven and based in logic would be neat, but every way of building such software that I can imagine would be infeasible to implement in a way that people would actually bother using. The best way to change my current belief of “I don’t know how anyone could build that” would be to offer me new information about how a software design for the purpose which didn’t suck could work.
your whole argument is based on the flaw that you trust people to vote correctly (however correct is defined). Or in other words, you trust that people are nice from your perspective.
The only way to prove conclusively that something could be improved upon is to suggest an improvement.
now we move from objectivism to what is good. The complete opposite.
Levitating would be better and that is the objective truth. Breathing pollutants is bad and that is the objective truth.
A forum with no voting has less to no censorship and that is the objective truth.
“a design which didn’t suck” comes down to a whole lot of subjective factors. As I already said forums with votes are preferred by people because votes are great as they give gratification and reward. This is a subjective topic.
What people like and do not like does not change the fact that votes create censorship.
You can not say that “votes create censorship” is wrong because people would not like a system without voting.
This is just disguised argumentum ad populum. Many people have to like it otherwise it is not true.
The only way to prove conclusively that something could be improved upon is to suggest an improvement.
that is the whole fallacy. A bad aspect can be definitely described without suggesting a solution. The problem and the solution are two entities. A math formula can be proven wrong without giving a solution. Votes create censorship is true even without a solution for it.
How would you even turn this around? What about problems where nobody found a solution yet? By your definition, they are not a problem, because one can not define a solution for them.
your whole argument is based on the flaw that you trust people to vote correctly (however correct is defined).
I trust groups to vote with relative consistency, and believe that if you have enough consistent-ish groups, it’s possible to find a group whose consistency adequately approximates your own idea of correctness.
You can not say that “votes create censorship” is wrong because people would not like a system without voting.
If you’re defining censorship as the phenomenon created by all voting done by humans, then sure, “votes create censorship” is a useful axiom.
Our difference of opinion seems to be that you’re starting with the abstract notions like “truth”, “good”, or “right”, and building toward the concrete from there. I’m starting with the concrete notions of “beneficial” and “useful”, and trying to build toward abstract notions from there. No argument about what’s useful or beneficial will influence someone who prioritizes other values over those, so I’ll stop wasting your time by making them.
Another option of course would be for me to try to start in “truth”/”good”/”right” concept-space and move toward the concrete from there, but every other time I’ve tried to have that sort of conversation online, it’s eventually turned out that each participant in the conversation had differences of opinion about the way that the truth/good/right concept area works which only come to light once the conversation makes it to the specifics. Arguing from truth/good/right down to concrete examples only to have to repeat the whole process when the definitions turn out to have been inadequately specified wouldn’t be true/good/right by my own standards, so I won’t :)
Without voting, how would you propose that users share metadata about which content is factually accurate/inaccurate, “objectively” true/false arguments, or just unusually worth reading for people like themselves? One of the major advantages of forums is that they allow users to filter which information is likeliest to be relevant or helpful to others, rather than forcing every user to read and evaluate every post.
Sometimes when a system propagates prejudice, it can be a win to discard the system entirely. Consider the end of segregation in the US, as a minimally controversial example—by abolishing an unfixably prejudiced system, much was gained and nothing worth keeping was lost.
But many times, it would be a net loss to completely throw out a prejudiced system rather than fixing the prejudice within it. A clear example of such a system in the real world is western medicine: It contains some bias and prejudice. Patients of certain appearances in certain regions get measurably worse medical care than people of other appearances in the same region. But the presence of bias isn’t a compelling argument to abolish the whole institution of medicine, because the drawbacks of doing so would vastly outweigh any benefits of “now everybody gets the worst treatment”.
I’d contend that forum voting is in the latter category: Readers derive so much benefit from having help in choosing which content is most engaging, accurate, relevant, and timely that scrapping the whole system due to the possibility of bias would eliminate many of the reasons that people bother using forums at all. (perhaps we disagree on why forums are useful or desirable to engage with?)
What might addressing bias problems look like on a forum where “a person might make an objectively true argument but gets downvoted because of prejudice against the arguer”? I think that online forums offer a unique opportunity for arguers to sidestep any prejudice that they might experience elsewhere. Authors have absolute control over which forums they choose to post to, what username they choose to post under, and what tone and examples they choose to use in their posts. This allows posts to be evaluated on a combination of their logical merits and the cleverness of the author in cleansing them of prejudice-relevant content, rather than on factors outside the author’s control that inevitably color conversations in person or even over audio or video media. If an argument gets downvoted because of “prejudice”, the author has a trivially easy recourse: they can strip the content or context which invoked the prejudice (possibly by changing their wording or their account, possibly by going to a different forum) and try again, to see whether the negative reaction was actually due to the prejudice they assumed, or perhaps could be due to having a less sound logical argument or worse relevance to the audience than they’d initially assumed.
IRL, people who frequently say useful and novel things about their field often become recognized as authorities, and are more likely to have a wider platform of listeners. People who frequently say things that directly disadvantage their listeners are often written off as crackpots and ignored. Sure, a given speaker can be regarded as an authority by one group and a crackpot by another if the groups have enough variation in their utility functions, but that’s to be expected.
I agree with the overall sentiment, yet there is no forum system that I’m aware of where it ensures that people have to vote on objectivity.
I do not like your statement, so I will downvote it. My downvote does not have to be reasoned or explained.
You described it nicely in the IRL version with the crackpot. One group of people concludes that the person is speaking the truth and is objectively correct. The other sees them as a crackpot because of their personal beliefs. In a forum, the second group has the power to downvote.
”a person might make an objectively true argument but gets downvoted because of prejudice against the arguer”
was not formulated well
”a person might make an objectively true argument but gets downvoted because of personal beliefs of the reader”
″Without voting, how would you propose that users share metadata about which content is factually accurate/inaccurate, “objectively” true/false arguments, or just unusually worth reading for people like themselves?”
random people on the internet sure are not the group of people fit for this, especially when voting takes no time or reasoning and nobody checks if it is correct or wrong.
Thanks, that helps me understand where you’re coming from.
From your downvote, I learn that I presented my ideas in a way which decreased your likelihood of coming to agree with me. I can use that information to change how I present my ideas in the future if I want them to have a higher likelihood of influencing you.
I agree that downvotes often represent personal beliefs. However, personal beliefs tend to come from experiences, and forums tend to attempt to attract groups of people with particular shared beliefs or experiences. In as much as any argument can be “objectively true”, not all true arguments are useful to a particular group, and belief-based downvoting of technically-true ideas often expresses the opinion that the ideas are not useful in the forum’s context.
If you believe there’s a benefit to having separate forums for separate topics, true-but-not-useful is an argument for how users can keep forums on-topic. If you do not believe there’s a benefit to having separate topical forums, and instead think there should only be a single forum for all conversation, true-but-not-useful downvoting in such a forum would be an antipattern since almost any truth has the potential to be useful to somebody.
If each forum was populated by a truly random group of people, I would agree entirely with this claim. However, I don’t believe that internet forums attract random groups. Instead, I believe that each forum attracts a group with some interest in its primary topic, and over time develops social norms that reward producing content which is particularly useful to that group. I see upvotes and downvotes as also participating in that social reward system whereby a group chooses how it wants its content to differ from randomness.
again this all loops around to trusting a group of people to vote correctly.
How you define the group of people and what is correct is irrelevant.
I can agree that there should be sites where you can share things you like purely based on beliefs and personal opinions of you and a group of people.
For a forum aimed at objective discussion, voting is counterproductive, at least in the way voting is implemented in any forum nowadays.
Aim for rational reasoning and truth, yet anybody can vote based on personal beliefs and emotions to bury the truth.
And again, downvoting to keep objectively bad content away like a post that is not fitting for the category would be reasonable yet no voting system reflects that.
Huh? I think the definitions of the group and of correctness are extremely relevant.
For instance, I was on a forum for learning Chinese (a topic about which I know almost nothing), you could absolutely not trust me to vote “correctly” on a post claiming that a particular character represents a particular word. There’s a “correct” answer for that question, in that most Chinese speakers will say that the character either does or doesn’t approximate the word, but due to my membership in the group of “people who speak no Chinese whatsoever”, I am fundamentally unqualified to be voting on such a topic.
If the definitions of the group and correctness were truly irrelevant, this single case of my being unqualified to vote would prove I was never to be trusted to vote correctly. However, if I was on a forum more germane to my local area or fields of study, my votes would become more useful. For instance, if a commenter insisted that no algorithm could ever sort a list of integers faster than O(n^2), I could not only give them a “correct” downvote but also introduce them to radix sort in the comments. I can only vote correctly on that topic because I’m in the group of people who have picked up some CS education.
“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be” doesn’t guarantee that the destruction will be easy, or that all presentations of a given truth will be equally effective at destroying what they can.
To propagate through society, a piece of truth must be presented in a way which destroys or evades common resistances to it. If a forum chose to coddle every post with a bit of truth in it, even those presented in ways which deter the audience from considering them, it would doom those truths to never leave its own echo chamber. One essential function of a forum whose goal is not only to find truths but also to encourage the rest of the world to do so is to refine the technology of presenting truths in ways that make them easier for people to use. From this perspective, merely being accurate doesn’t justify promoting a truth—a truth can only accomplish its goals if it’s also presented in a way that allows people to understand and use it.
So, if a truth is packaged in a way that causes even rationality-inclined readers to reflexively downvote it based on their beliefs and emotions, that particular presentation of the truth is extremely unlikely to be worth sharing. Decouple the effectiveness of a truth’s packaging from the accuracy of the truth itself, and downvotes start to look like criticism of the presentation rather than of its contents (because with bad enough presentation, readers likely couldn’t get at the contents at all). Offering a truth in a really bad presentation is not unlike a chef serving customers dinner in a steel box that’s welded shut—customers will leave poor reviews (or forum users will downvote) regardless of how good the food or the truth was, because the presentation prevented them from ever getting to it.
that’s a lot of if and when.
it does not matter what scenarios you bring up, an upvote or downvote has no reasoning.
Sure people might use it to categorize a false claim as bad which would be helpful.
But people can also use it to downvote based on their personal beliefs.
You can not prove either. Anybody can make a vote for any reason that the person has.
you can not prove if a vote has a beneficial effect or a negative one.
I can take 10 of my friends and downvote every one of your new posts and nobody will ever see them again.
A vote is anonymous, available to everybody, and can be done with good or bad intentions.
So it comes down to who does the voting.
And nobody controls who votes. It is a random group of people. And a random group of people never votes correctly.
nobody controls who votes. I can go to the Chinese forum and vote wrongly.
the whole point is that in a vote nothing is proven or not. Nobody knows if you are qualified or not. Nobody knows if the vote you gave is justified by reasoning or not.
All the problems you outline can be solved but not through a voting system as they are implemented currently. The voting systems as they are now are rather bad at solving the challenges you outline and in addition foster censorship.
If anything your arguments are more proof of why current voting systems are bad. Why do you trust a random group of people to decide what is a good presentation and what not? How do you know that they vote based on the presentation and not just because they do like the topic because it is against their personal beliefs?
No reason, or any reason? These two statements seem to contradict one another?
I agree! That’s why forums with critical mass of people who prefer to vote based on certain values are considered so enjoyable by some of us.
No one person controls who votes; that would be censorship. What controls who votes on a given forum is a complex social dynamic of who finds that forum a rewarding place to hang out, and upvotes are part of that social reward system among their other functions.
Sure, and then I could get some friends to vote them back up, or just ditch this alias and come back with a different name if I wanted the ideas to be seen. That’s the nice thing about being on the internet.
I trust groups to have inertia. For instance, I trust the LessWrong crowd to give far more upvotes to a post about AI than a post about what species of edible dahlias are best suited to zone 9a (even if the gardening post has better data behind it), but there are other forums where the opposite would be the case. People who like the group’s inertia tend to add to it, and people who find it intolerable tend to leave.
I think people do vote based on factors including liking the topic, liking the presentation, or the post’s agreement with their personal beliefs! I think the point of forums is to find a bunch of people whose interests align well enough with yours that their enjoyment of a particular post is a good predictor of your enjoyment of it.
If you want forum software where every vote has to be annotated with a logical proof of why it was given, nobody’s stopping you from building it.
no reasoning as in people do not have to lay out a logical proof why it was given.
any reason as in people vote based on emotions not just objectivity
still, it comes down to you thinking and hoping that everybody is nice. Which is a flaw. You have no argument against my statement other than “it is probably not that bad because people are nice, I think”
which is not an argument and has nothing to do with objectivity.
Ah yes, I love that usual “argument”:
”why don’t you do it better?” “nobody is stopping you from doing it yourself” “if you think it is bad you have to bring up ways to make it better”
completely irrelevant to discuss a critique. I’m pretty sure there is a name for such replies but I don’t remember it.
Where have I claimed that everyone was nice? To phrase my argument about how forums work in terms of niceness, it would be:
All individuals are nice in some ways and non-nice in others. When a forum lets people be nice to content they like, and mean to content they dislike, it causes the content on that forum to take on characteristics that reflect the characteristics of the group. People tend to be nice to content which is useful to them or makes them feel good, and mean to content which wastes their time or makes them feel bad. This means that by finding forums populated by voters who are similar to me in a relevant way, their votes can make me more likely to see content which is useful to me or makes me feel good,and less likely to see content which wastes my time or makes me feel bad.
I specifically desire to participate in forums where people who create content I’d find useless or time-wasting are downvoted! “false” and “incorrectly reasoned” are subsets of useless content, but they are not the only useless content that I prefer to avoid.
And if I wish to see exactly how a community votes in order to decide whether to engage with it, I can simply sort the content by lowest scoring, and if there’s stuff in there that I think shouldn’t have been downvoted so badly, I can choose to go converse on a different forum with a voting style more consistent with my values.
The only way to prove conclusively that something could be improved upon is to suggest an improvement.
I could critique breathing by saying it’s a bad idea because breathing pollutants is a common cause of sickness. But considering that breathing is so much better than not breathing at all, my critique would be useless unless I could suggest some alternative. I could suggest some alternative, like hooking ourselves up to blood-oxygenating machines instead of breathing, and then we could have an interesting conversation about whether that would actually be better. But without a suggestion, it’s not a critique at all, it’s just whining.
Or I could say it’d be better if we all learned to levitate and floated around instead of walking, because we wouldn’t have to wear shoes. Sure, levitating would be neat, but I’d be wasting time speculating about it unless I could suggest how to do it. Similarly, having a forum where votes had to be proven and based in logic would be neat, but every way of building such software that I can imagine would be infeasible to implement in a way that people would actually bother using. The best way to change my current belief of “I don’t know how anyone could build that” would be to offer me new information about how a software design for the purpose which didn’t suck could work.
your whole argument is based on the flaw that you trust people to vote correctly (however correct is defined). Or in other words, you trust that people are nice from your perspective.
now we move from objectivism to what is good. The complete opposite.
Levitating would be better and that is the objective truth.
Breathing pollutants is bad and that is the objective truth.
A forum with no voting has less to no censorship and that is the objective truth.
“a design which didn’t suck” comes down to a whole lot of subjective factors. As I already said forums with votes are preferred by people because votes are great as they give gratification and reward. This is a subjective topic.
What people like and do not like does not change the fact that votes create censorship.
You can not say that “votes create censorship” is wrong because people would not like a system without voting.
This is just disguised argumentum ad populum. Many people have to like it otherwise it is not true.
that is the whole fallacy. A bad aspect can be definitely described without suggesting a solution. The problem and the solution are two entities. A math formula can be proven wrong without giving a solution.
Votes create censorship is true even without a solution for it.
How would you even turn this around? What about problems where nobody found a solution yet? By your definition, they are not a problem, because one can not define a solution for them.
Thanks, now I see exactly where we diverge.
I trust groups to vote with relative consistency, and believe that if you have enough consistent-ish groups, it’s possible to find a group whose consistency adequately approximates your own idea of correctness.
If you’re defining censorship as the phenomenon created by all voting done by humans, then sure, “votes create censorship” is a useful axiom.
Our difference of opinion seems to be that you’re starting with the abstract notions like “truth”, “good”, or “right”, and building toward the concrete from there. I’m starting with the concrete notions of “beneficial” and “useful”, and trying to build toward abstract notions from there. No argument about what’s useful or beneficial will influence someone who prioritizes other values over those, so I’ll stop wasting your time by making them.
Another option of course would be for me to try to start in “truth”/”good”/”right” concept-space and move toward the concrete from there, but every other time I’ve tried to have that sort of conversation online, it’s eventually turned out that each participant in the conversation had differences of opinion about the way that the truth/good/right concept area works which only come to light once the conversation makes it to the specifics. Arguing from truth/good/right down to concrete examples only to have to repeat the whole process when the definitions turn out to have been inadequately specified wouldn’t be true/good/right by my own standards, so I won’t :)