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 :)
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 :)