What should I understand from the instant negative karma response? That I shouldn’t have asked the question, I suppose. If I shouldn’t have asked the question, then… I’m supposed to see a new thread in Discussion getting 300 replies in 3 days, remember the same thing happened with the previous threads in the series, and go, “Oh… nothing unusual at all, no special reaction to this topic.”. Or, I’m expected to know the answer just like everybody else does, and therefore by asking the question I’m actually expressing an opinion on everybody who commented and I’m not actually looking for an answer.
But I am. Getting worked up about this topic could mean a number of things with respect to your attitude towards gender issues, and I don’t know the bunch of you well enough to say which is the prevailing explanation. Hence the question. And I suppose now there’s an additional question about why it is so taboo to ask this, which I’m also genuinely interested in.
Why do LWers seem to get their collective panties in a bunch every time gender issues / women are mentioned?
Your phrasing implies that people are overreacting and being ridiculous. A more neutral phrasing—something like “Why are people so angry about gender issues?” or “Why do gender issues get so much attention?”—probably would have gone over better.
Heh. I went with that word choice because it’s a funny little idiom. I like English idioms; my language is not as entertaining in this aspect. But you’re right, it isn’t optimized for upvotes.
It’s sounds like you ran afoul of a subcutlural difference—one of the aspects of the anti-racism and related feminism memeplex is assuming that what metaphors people use tell you a lot about what they’re actually thinking, and in particular that hostility and culpable ignorance get revealed that way.
Not quite, in that many more people understand “lame” to describe someone who can’t easily walk than understand “bad” to describe someone who exists on a gender binary, and what I expect people to actually understand by a word does have something to do with what words I chose.
What should I understand from the instant negative karma response?
You seemed to object in another comment to a response which “could’ve been an explanation, but in the end it turned out to be declaring sides.” Well, your question reads like a straightforward declaration of sides. Hence the downvoting. NancyLebovitz is also correct.
Well, your question reads like a straightforward declaration of sides.
That was… unexpected. It never crossed my mind that people could infer anything about my position on gender issues from that question—and if you asked me now, I couldn’t say which is the side that it supposedly belongs on. (Just to hazard a guess, the answer might be “the enemy side”, whichever side you’re on, but I can’t arrive to that answer without assuming bias on the part of downvoters, and I very much hope that LW isn’t the crowd to do that to; besides, it would be uncharitable of me. So, I’ll wait for the others to inform me.)
However, if you’ve read some of the previous discussions on the subject—the background is the idea that LW defaults to being a sufficiently uncomfortable place for women that women don’t stay, and this is a problem.
As a result, asking why are people getting so worked up about the subject looks like saying that the default style at LW is satisfactory, and if women don’t like it, that’s not important enough to be worth dealing with.
Oh. Thanks for the explanation! Of course, needless to say, it wasn’t the reason for my bemusement—for one, it’s pretty obvious to everyone who reads the comments that people’s concern for how LW is viewed by women isn’t the reason why the thread has garnered so many responses. Given what people are saying, the number of comments isn’t evidence of their desire to get more women involved in the community, but rather of getting very eager at the opportunity to discuss something as controversial as this.
And that’s what surprised me—at least to my noob’s eye, LWers didn’t come across as the kinds of people who feel strongly about controversial topics; a more detached, analytical stance was more characteristic of the image I had about this site. I suppose I kind of generalized this impression into thinking that, on average, this was also how LWers thought of themselves and of each other. (Projection?) So, ordinarily you don’t see people spontaneously bringing up gender issues in normal conversation on this discussion board, but when someone makes it their personal initiative to see what’s up with the overwhelming maleness of this forum—holy mama! 300+ comments. It looked to me like bottling up one’s own interest in the matter, like people cared more than they were willing to admit. So I was like, “what the hell, I thought you guys were the dispassionate scientists looking at things objectively, why are you reacting to this like—like ordinary people?”
LWers didn’t come across as the kinds of people who feel strongly about controversial topics
Your perception is a product of topic selection. Certain topics are perceived as destabilizing of the community, and thus are downvoted viciously unless they are of unusual quality.
Since writing at that level of quality is hard, certain topics get discussed less. What does get discussed is the stuff where most of us are able to take a “more detached, analytical stance.”
Oh. I asked the question immediately after seeing that the parent comment had gotten −2 within minutes of being posted, so I was expecting the trend to continue. It didn’t.
It’s a fair question to ask. The downvotes may not be “the view of the forum”, whatever that is, but they’re certainly the view of the downvoters.
If I downvote something, it’s because I want to see less of it. If the other party wants to cooperate with this, shouldn’t they at least know what I want to see less of?
If they wanted to explain with a comment, they would’ve. The point of downvotes is to create a system of feedback that is easy to provide and doesn’t clutter up the boards with millions of comments saying “Me too!” or “I think your point was written in a demeaning fashion”
However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn’t know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it’s perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation.
As the one who wrote that, I’m obviously in favor of asking for explanations, but drethelin’s point (that the first few upvotes or downvotes are not always the start of a cascade) is important to bear in mind before concluding that LW feels really strongly in general.
In addition to random noise, there’s the phenomenon that immediate votes are usually from the very active users who are reading Recent Comments, and that those users are often more critical in their voting behavior than the people who only check in sporadically.
I don’t read the intro thread or write it. Opinions written by Drethelin do not represent in whole or in part the views of Lesswrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Quirinus Quirrel
Alright, so the community is divided on this matter. So then, when you were telling me never to complain about karma, were you advising me on how to optimize for the community’s approval, or for your approval?
The intro thread is a simplification of the community norm about asking for explanation of downvotes. In fact, the particular simplification is very misleading of the fairly complex community norm on this issue (and votes are such a small percentage of readers that any particular post could easily be voted quite differently than the community norm might predict).
Karma as a feedback mechanism allows users’ perceptions of whether someone is contributing positively or negatively to take on lasting status associations, in a way that comments do not. Plus, it encourages users to provide feedback more frequently than they would if they had no way of doing so other than leaving comments. Karma would most likely continue to fulfill these purposes even if people leaving downvotes or upvotes always explained themselves on request, as requests are infrequent enough that the possibility of having to explain oneself would probably not be a powerful deterrent to voting.
I think it’s interesting how many “things you [supposedly] can’t say” about society are actually very commonly said, throughout mainstream media, religious preaching, popular fiction and nonfiction.
Um, no. The reason it seems this way to you is that when you attempt to think of what the “things you can’t say” are, your search space is limited to things you’ve actually heard.
[META] Why do LWers seem to get their collective panties in a bunch every time gender issues / women are mentioned?
It’s the isreal/palestine conflict that everyone can feel involved in. Wherever you live, you’re on one side or the other or the other or the other.
What should I understand from the instant negative karma response? That I shouldn’t have asked the question, I suppose. If I shouldn’t have asked the question, then… I’m supposed to see a new thread in Discussion getting 300 replies in 3 days, remember the same thing happened with the previous threads in the series, and go, “Oh… nothing unusual at all, no special reaction to this topic.”. Or, I’m expected to know the answer just like everybody else does, and therefore by asking the question I’m actually expressing an opinion on everybody who commented and I’m not actually looking for an answer.
But I am. Getting worked up about this topic could mean a number of things with respect to your attitude towards gender issues, and I don’t know the bunch of you well enough to say which is the prevailing explanation. Hence the question. And I suppose now there’s an additional question about why it is so taboo to ask this, which I’m also genuinely interested in.
Your phrasing implies that people are overreacting and being ridiculous. A more neutral phrasing—something like “Why are people so angry about gender issues?” or “Why do gender issues get so much attention?”—probably would have gone over better.
Heh. I went with that word choice because it’s a funny little idiom. I like English idioms; my language is not as entertaining in this aspect. But you’re right, it isn’t optimized for upvotes.
It’s sounds like you ran afoul of a subcutlural difference—one of the aspects of the anti-racism and related feminism memeplex is assuming that what metaphors people use tell you a lot about what they’re actually thinking, and in particular that hostility and culpable ignorance get revealed that way.
‘Using “lame” as an insult is ableist!’ (By which logic, using “bad” as an insult is binarist.)
Not quite, in that many more people understand “lame” to describe someone who can’t easily walk than understand “bad” to describe someone who exists on a gender binary, and what I expect people to actually understand by a word does have something to do with what words I chose.
You seemed to object in another comment to a response which “could’ve been an explanation, but in the end it turned out to be declaring sides.” Well, your question reads like a straightforward declaration of sides. Hence the downvoting. NancyLebovitz is also correct.
That was… unexpected. It never crossed my mind that people could infer anything about my position on gender issues from that question—and if you asked me now, I couldn’t say which is the side that it supposedly belongs on. (Just to hazard a guess, the answer might be “the enemy side”, whichever side you’re on, but I can’t arrive to that answer without assuming bias on the part of downvoters, and I very much hope that LW isn’t the crowd to do that to; besides, it would be uncharitable of me. So, I’ll wait for the others to inform me.)
I didn’t downvote you.
However, if you’ve read some of the previous discussions on the subject—the background is the idea that LW defaults to being a sufficiently uncomfortable place for women that women don’t stay, and this is a problem.
As a result, asking why are people getting so worked up about the subject looks like saying that the default style at LW is satisfactory, and if women don’t like it, that’s not important enough to be worth dealing with.
LW Women: LW Online
LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
Oh. Thanks for the explanation! Of course, needless to say, it wasn’t the reason for my bemusement—for one, it’s pretty obvious to everyone who reads the comments that people’s concern for how LW is viewed by women isn’t the reason why the thread has garnered so many responses. Given what people are saying, the number of comments isn’t evidence of their desire to get more women involved in the community, but rather of getting very eager at the opportunity to discuss something as controversial as this.
And that’s what surprised me—at least to my noob’s eye, LWers didn’t come across as the kinds of people who feel strongly about controversial topics; a more detached, analytical stance was more characteristic of the image I had about this site. I suppose I kind of generalized this impression into thinking that, on average, this was also how LWers thought of themselves and of each other. (Projection?) So, ordinarily you don’t see people spontaneously bringing up gender issues in normal conversation on this discussion board, but when someone makes it their personal initiative to see what’s up with the overwhelming maleness of this forum—holy mama! 300+ comments. It looked to me like bottling up one’s own interest in the matter, like people cared more than they were willing to admit. So I was like, “what the hell, I thought you guys were the dispassionate scientists looking at things objectively, why are you reacting to this like—like ordinary people?”
Your perception is a product of topic selection. Certain topics are perceived as destabilizing of the community, and thus are downvoted viciously unless they are of unusual quality.
Since writing at that level of quality is hard, certain topics get discussed less. What does get discussed is the stuff where most of us are able to take a “more detached, analytical stance.”
As I read this, the comment’s karma is (0, 50%), so I think the correct answer is “nothing much”.
Oh. I asked the question immediately after seeing that the parent comment had gotten −2 within minutes of being posted, so I was expecting the trend to continue. It didn’t.
never complain about karma, but ESPECIALLY never try to portray a few downvotes as the view of the forum.
I now strongly agree with the part after the “especially”, especially when “a few” equals 1.
It’s a fair question to ask. The downvotes may not be “the view of the forum”, whatever that is, but they’re certainly the view of the downvoters.
If I downvote something, it’s because I want to see less of it. If the other party wants to cooperate with this, shouldn’t they at least know what I want to see less of?
If they wanted to explain with a comment, they would’ve. The point of downvotes is to create a system of feedback that is easy to provide and doesn’t clutter up the boards with millions of comments saying “Me too!” or “I think your point was written in a demeaning fashion”
Advice given to newbies, from the current intro thread:
So which way is it?
As the one who wrote that, I’m obviously in favor of asking for explanations, but drethelin’s point (that the first few upvotes or downvotes are not always the start of a cascade) is important to bear in mind before concluding that LW feels really strongly in general.
In addition to random noise, there’s the phenomenon that immediate votes are usually from the very active users who are reading Recent Comments, and that those users are often more critical in their voting behavior than the people who only check in sporadically.
I don’t read the intro thread or write it. Opinions written by Drethelin do not represent in whole or in part the views of Lesswrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Quirinus Quirrel
Alright, so the community is divided on this matter. So then, when you were telling me never to complain about karma, were you advising me on how to optimize for the community’s approval, or for your approval?
Some prior discussion of this issue. Short summary:
The intro thread is a simplification of the community norm about asking for explanation of downvotes. In fact, the particular simplification is very misleading of the fairly complex community norm on this issue (and votes are such a small percentage of readers that any particular post could easily be voted quite differently than the community norm might predict).
Karma as a feedback mechanism allows users’ perceptions of whether someone is contributing positively or negatively to take on lasting status associations, in a way that comments do not. Plus, it encourages users to provide feedback more frequently than they would if they had no way of doing so other than leaving comments. Karma would most likely continue to fulfill these purposes even if people leaving downvotes or upvotes always explained themselves on request, as requests are infrequent enough that the possibility of having to explain oneself would probably not be a powerful deterrent to voting.
Because this is a topic on which there are an unusually large number of true things that it isn’t socially acceptable to say.
And possibly a hefty amount of socially unacceptable false things too.
It could’ve been an explanation, but in the end it turned out to be declaring sides.
I think it’s interesting how many “things you [supposedly] can’t say” about society are actually very commonly said, throughout mainstream media, religious preaching, popular fiction and nonfiction.
Um, no. The reason it seems this way to you is that when you attempt to think of what the “things you can’t say” are, your search space is limited to things you’ve actually heard.
Source?
(Not saying you’re wrong, mind.)