Nice. Here I present what I genuinely think is a flaw in this article, and instead of getting replies, I am just voted down “below threshold”. I believe I have pointed out exactly what I disagree with and why. I would have been happy to hear people disagreeing or asking me to look at this from some other perspective. But apparently there is a penalty for violating the unwritten community rule that “Eliezer’s posts are unfailingly brilliant and flawless”.
I have learned a lot from this website. There are sometimes very deep ideas, and intelligent debate. But I think the community is not for me, so I will let this account die and go back to lurking.
I didn’t see you complaining for the upvotes you got in other comments. You just barge in here to accuse us of groupthink if you get downvoted (never complaining about unjust upvotes), because you can’t even imagine any legitimate reason that could have gotten you downvotes for a badly written and incoherent post. It seems a very common practice in the last couple weeks—CriticalSteel did it, sam did it, you now do it.
As for your specific comment, it was utterly muddled and confused—it didn’t even understand what the article it was responding to was about. For example what was there in the original article that made you think “Who is telling you that all the moral and spiritual aspects of the conditio humana aren’t going to pop up in your simulation”? is actually disagreeing with something in the article?
And on top of that you add strange inanities, like the claim that “moral and spiritual aspects” of the human condition (which for some reason you wrote in Latin, perhaps to impress us with fancy terms—which alone would have deserved a downvote) are epiphenomenal in our universe. The very fact that we can discuss them means they affect our material world (e.g. by typing posts in this forum about them), which means they are NOT epiphenomenal.
You didn’t get downvotes from me before, but you most definitely deserve them, so I’ll correct this omission on both the parent and the grandparent post.
Your comment saddens me. It displays the typical lesswrong mindset that lesswrong is the last resort of sanity and everyone else is just stupid and not even worthy of more than a downvote.
If you really dislike everyone else so much why don’t you people turn this into a private mailing list where only those that are worthwhile can participate? Or make a survey a mandatory part of the registration procedure where everyone who fails some basic measure is told to go away.
Either that or you stop bitching and ignore stupid comments. Or you actually try to refine people’s rationality by communicating the insights that the others miss.
The very fact that we can discuss them means they affect our material world (e.g. by typing posts in this forum about them), which means they are NOT epiphenomenal.
Have you tried Wikipedia? “In the more general use of the word a causal relationship between the phenomena is implied: the epiphenomenon is a consequence of the primary phenomenon;”
What he tried to say is that “moral and spiritual aspects” of the human condition might be an implied consequence of the initial state of a certain cellular automaton.
It displays the typical lesswrong mindset that lesswrong is the last resort of sanity and everyone else is just stupid and not even worthy of more than a downvote.
Really? I think my flaw has generally been the opposite, I try to talk to people far beyond the extent that it is meaningful Just recently that was exemplified.
If you really dislike everyone else so much why don’t you people
Who is “us people”? People that downvoted deeb without a comment? But I’m not one of them—I downvoted him only after explaining in detail why he’s being downvoted. The typical LW member? You’ve been longer in LessWrong than I have been, I believe, and have a much higher karma score. I’m much closer to being an outsider than you are.
Have you tried Wikipedia?
You are looking at the medicinal section—when one talks about spiritual or moral aspects of the human condition, the philosophical meaning of the word is normally understood. “In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is the view that mental phenomena are epiphenomena in that they can be caused by physical phenomena, but cannot cause physical phenomena. ” as the article you linked to says.
Perhaps you know what he tried to say, but I don’t. Even if he meant what you believe him to have meant (which is still a wrong usage of the word), I still don’t see how this works as a meaningful objection to the article.
Yes, but you don’t try to learn true things from the points they make, or even to gently coax them out of innocent mistakes. You try to hand them their asses in front of an audience. And the audience already knows that mysterianism is silly. Insulting someone doesn’t teach them not to write incoherent posts, and doesn’t teach outsiders that incoherent posts are bad. It does teach us that you are badass, but we’ve sort of gotten the point by now.
Except the part about being “badass”, which is probably the least like I feel, and is probably the least likely I ‘teach’ to anyone. “Weak-willed enough that I got counterproductively angry, and depressed” is closer to how I feel after I get more involved in a thread than I should have.
I should probably wait a couple hours before I reply to a post that annoys me—by then I’ll probably be able to better evaluate if a reply is actually worthwhile, and in what manner I should respond.
I should probably wait a couple hours before I reply to a post that annoys me—by then I’ll probably be able to better evaluate if a reply is actually worthwhile, and in what manner I should respond.
I find that more often the most useful approach turns out to be downvote then ignore. It is far too easy to get baited into conversations that are a lost cause from the moment they begin.
Well, your reply to me is much better. You exposed some flaws in my reasoning with actual arguments while being more polite even given the fact that my comment wasn’t. That’s what I like to see more of.
...which is still a wrong usage of the word...
I used that word before the way I indicated. Not that you are wrong...but I usually look up words at Wikipedia or Merriam-Webster and when the definition seems fit use them for my purposes. Sure, that’s laziness on my side. But it might be useful to sometimes apply a bit of guesswork at what someone else could have meant on an international forum.
I’m much closer to being an outsider than you are.
I guess. I just can’t identify with most people here so it’s hard to see me as a part of this community.
It displays the typical lesswrong mindset that lesswrong is the last resort of sanity
It’s not a guardian of truth. It grew from insanity, so others may have as well—from Dennett to Drescher, there’s no telling about the ideas of others until they open their mouths.
[extreme solution A.] Either that or [opposite equally extreme solution B.]
I choose a third alternative that’s less extreme.
The very fact that we can discuss them means they affect our material world (e.g. by typing posts in this forum about them),
In the more general use of the word a causal relationship between the phenomena is implied: the epiphenomenon is a consequence of the primary phenomenon
The directionality isn’t symmetrical, it only goes one way. Wikipedia:
An epiphenomenon can be an effect of primary phenomena, but cannot affect a primary phenomenon. In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is the view that mental phenomena are epiphenomena in that they can be caused by physical phenomena, but cannot cause physical phenomena.
Personally I think that this call voting is indeed useless and belongs to places such as Youtube or other such sites where you can’t expect a meaningful discussion in the first place. Here, if a person disagrees with you, I believe she or he should post a counter argument instead of yelling “your are wrong!”, that is, giving a negative vote.
The problem with downvotes is that those who are downvoted are rarely people who know that they are wrong, otherwise they would have deliberately submitted something that they knew would be downvoted, in which case the downvotes would be expected and have little or no effect on the future behavior of the person.
In some cases downvotes might cause a person to reflect on what they have written. But that will only happen if the person believes that downvotes are evidence that their submissions are actually faulty rather than signaling that the person who downvoted did so for various other reasons than being right.
Even if all requirements for a successful downvote are met, the person might very well not be able to figure out how exactly they are wrong due to the change of a number associated with their submission. The information is simply not sufficient. Which will cause the person to either continue to express their opinion or avoid further discussion and continue to hold wrong beliefs.
With respect to the reputation system employed on lesswrong it is often argued that little information is better than no information. Yet humans can easily be overwhelmed by too much information. Especially if the information are easily misjudged and only provide little feedback. Such information might only add to the overall noise.
And even if the above mentioned problems wouldn’t exist, reputation systems might easily reinforce any groupthink, if only by causing those who disagree to be discouraged and those who agree to be rewarded.
If everyone was perfectly rational a reputation system would be a valueable tool. But lesswrong is open to everyone. Even if most of the voting behavior is currently free of bias and motivated cognition it might not stay that way for very long.
Take for example the voting pattern when it comes to plain English, easily digestible submissions, versus highly technical posts including math. A lot of the latter category receives much less upvotes. The writing of technical posts is actively discouraged by this inevitable effect of a reputation system.
Worst of all, any reputation system protects itself by making those who most benefit from it defend its value.
Well, there are two different aspects in Less Wrong system : the global karma of a person, and the score of a comment.
I agree that the “global karma of a person” is of mitigated use. It does sometimes give me a little kick to be more careful in writing on LW (and I’m probably not the only one), but only slightly, and it does have significant drawbacks.
But the score of one comment has a different purpose : the purpose is that a third party (not the one who posted the comment nor the one who put the upvote/downvote) can easily select comments worth to read and those which are not. In that regard, it works relatively well—not perfectly, but better than nothing. And in that regard, it doesn’t really matter if the OP understands why he is downvoted, and in that regard, explaining why you downvote does more harm than good—it decreases the signal/noise ratio (unless the explanation itself is very interesting, like it points to a fallacy that is not commonly recognized).
I didn’t vote down your post (or even see it until just now), but it came across as a bit disdainful while being written rather confusingly. The former is going to poorly dispose people toward your message, and the latter is going to poorly dispose people toward taking the trouble to respond to it. If you try rephrasing in a clearer way, you might see more discussion.
Then maybe, instead of just downvoting, these persons should have asked him to clarify and repharse his post. This would have actually led to an interesting dicussion, while downvoting gave nobody nothing.
Maybe it should be possible to downvote a post only if you also reply to that post.
That would kill the main idea of downvoting which is to improve the signal/noise ratio by ensuring comments made by “trolls” just aren’t noticed anymore unless people really want to see them.
Downvoting does lead to abuses, and I do consider that downvoting deeb’s comment was not really needed, but forcing to make comments will kill the purpose, and not really prevent the abuses.
That would kill the main idea of downvoting which is to improve the signal/noise ratio by ensuring comments made by “trolls” just aren’t noticed anymore unless people really want to see them.
Khan Academy employs a reputation system such as lesswrong. What happened is that completely useless comments, e.g. “YES WE KHAN!!!!!! :)”, are voted up and drown all useful comments.
YouTube also employs a reputation system where people can upvote and downvote comments. And what happens?
Well, Less Wrong is a well-kept garden not a mass public community like YouTube.
The karma system is not perfect, but IMHO it does more good than harm (and I say that even if some of my comments were downvoted). “Chinese People Suck” would be quickly downvoted below threshold here. At least, I give a high (>90%) confidence to it.
I’d like to attest that I find the karma system (by which I understand not just the software but the way the community uses it) a huge blessing and part of LW’s appeal to me. It is a strong incentive to pause and ask myself if I even have something to say before I open my mouth around here (which is why I haven’t written a main blog post yet) rather than just fling crap at the wall like one does in the rest of the Internet.
The “downvotes vs replies” problem is, I think, for the most part a non-issue. Anyone who’s been here a bit will know that if (generic) you ask for clarification of your downvotes, people will generally provide as long as you’re not acting whiney or sore about it. And there will be nothing stopping you from constructively engaging them on the points raised (though beware to actually apply reading comprehension to what is said then, because people don’t like it when you fail to update).
I’d like to attest that I find the karma system (by which I understand not just the software but the way the community uses it) a huge blessing and part of LW’s appeal to me. It is a strong incentive to pause and ask myself if I even have something to say before I open my mouth around here...
Yes, I also see that a reputation system does have positive effects given certain circumstances. But would you want to have such a system employed on a global basis, where millions could downvote you for saying that there is no God? Obviously such a system would be really bad for the kind of people who read lesswrong and for the world as a whole.
That means that the use of the system on lesswrong is based on the assumption that it will only be used by people who are much like you and will therefore work well for you. But given that lesswrong is an open system, will it always stay that way? At what point is it going to fail on you, how will you notice, how do you set the threshold?
And given that the system works so well as to keep everyone who doesn’t think like you off lesswrong, how are you going to notice negative effects of groupthink? Do we trust our abilities to seek truth enough to notice when the system starts to discourage people who are actually less wrong than lesswrong?
That means that the use of the system on lesswrong is based on the assumption that it will only be used by people who are much like you and will therefore work well for you. But given that lesswrong is an open system, will it always stay that way?
Well, nothing lasts forever, supposedly. If in future Less Wrong’s quality gets diluted away, it won’t matter to me if it keeps using the vote system or something else because I won’t care to be on Less Wrong any more.
However, part of the function of the vote system is selection. To put it brutally, it drives away incompatible people (and signals positively to compatible ones). So I think LW will stay worthwhile for quite a while.
And yes, in a way this is one of your negatives from your other post which I actually think is a positive. If someone gets consistently downvoted, doesn’t get why, AND can’t ask and find out and update on that, then with some probability we can say we don’t want them here. I’m sure we lose some good people this way too, but the system’s better than nothing; at least what gets through the filter is much better than things would be without it.
What happened is that completely useless comments, e.g. “YES WE KHAN!!!!!! :)”, are voted up and drown all useful comments
As far as I can tell, there are no useful comments in the comments section. In the complete absence of anything of substance (a situation LW is not in danger of being), simple community applause lights floating up is understandable. The situation in the Q&A section, where there is substance, appears better.
Also you picked a page which looks like it’s largely populated by schoolchildren. Youtube is populated by, well, everyone. LW’s audience is strongly selected. I don’t know if I even need to say this, but it seems reasonable to expect the downvote system to be used more usefully on LW than on youtube.
My point is that the negative aspects of such a system are rarely compared to the positive aspects.
People say that the reputation system employed by lesswrong holds the trolls at bay and reduces noise. Yet when I am showing that reputation systems frequently fail at doing so, the same people argue that lesswrong is different and that’s why it works. Does it? Or does it just look like it works because lesswrong is different?
Do the positive effects really outweigh the negative?
But apparently there is a penalty for violating the unwritten community rule that “Eliezer’s posts are unfailingly brilliant and flawless”.
The outside view is that someone complaining about being downvoted for specific reasons is usually wrong about such reasons. Perhaps someone could compile a list of cases.
That isn’t surprising. If I can correctly analyze my reasons for being downvoted, I can probably also figure out that complaining about it doesn’t get me anything I want.
Nice. Here I present what I genuinely think is a flaw in this article, and instead of getting replies, I am just voted down “below threshold”. I believe I have pointed out exactly what I disagree with and why. I would have been happy to hear people disagreeing or asking me to look at this from some other perspective. But apparently there is a penalty for violating the unwritten community rule that “Eliezer’s posts are unfailingly brilliant and flawless”. I have learned a lot from this website. There are sometimes very deep ideas, and intelligent debate. But I think the community is not for me, so I will let this account die and go back to lurking.
I didn’t see you complaining for the upvotes you got in other comments. You just barge in here to accuse us of groupthink if you get downvoted (never complaining about unjust upvotes), because you can’t even imagine any legitimate reason that could have gotten you downvotes for a badly written and incoherent post. It seems a very common practice in the last couple weeks—CriticalSteel did it, sam did it, you now do it.
As for your specific comment, it was utterly muddled and confused—it didn’t even understand what the article it was responding to was about. For example what was there in the original article that made you think “Who is telling you that all the moral and spiritual aspects of the conditio humana aren’t going to pop up in your simulation”? is actually disagreeing with something in the article?
And on top of that you add strange inanities, like the claim that “moral and spiritual aspects” of the human condition (which for some reason you wrote in Latin, perhaps to impress us with fancy terms—which alone would have deserved a downvote) are epiphenomenal in our universe. The very fact that we can discuss them means they affect our material world (e.g. by typing posts in this forum about them), which means they are NOT epiphenomenal.
You didn’t get downvotes from me before, but you most definitely deserve them, so I’ll correct this omission on both the parent and the grandparent post.
Your comment saddens me. It displays the typical lesswrong mindset that lesswrong is the last resort of sanity and everyone else is just stupid and not even worthy of more than a downvote.
I don’t see much evidence that a lot of people here even try to understand the other side or try to politely correct them.
If you really dislike everyone else so much why don’t you people turn this into a private mailing list where only those that are worthwhile can participate? Or make a survey a mandatory part of the registration procedure where everyone who fails some basic measure is told to go away.
Either that or you stop bitching and ignore stupid comments. Or you actually try to refine people’s rationality by communicating the insights that the others miss.
Have you tried Wikipedia? “In the more general use of the word a causal relationship between the phenomena is implied: the epiphenomenon is a consequence of the primary phenomenon;”
What he tried to say is that “moral and spiritual aspects” of the human condition might be an implied consequence of the initial state of a certain cellular automaton.
Really? I think my flaw has generally been the opposite, I try to talk to people far beyond the extent that it is meaningful Just recently that was exemplified.
Who is “us people”? People that downvoted deeb without a comment? But I’m not one of them—I downvoted him only after explaining in detail why he’s being downvoted. The typical LW member? You’ve been longer in LessWrong than I have been, I believe, and have a much higher karma score. I’m much closer to being an outsider than you are.
You are looking at the medicinal section—when one talks about spiritual or moral aspects of the human condition, the philosophical meaning of the word is normally understood. “In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is the view that mental phenomena are epiphenomena in that they can be caused by physical phenomena, but cannot cause physical phenomena. ” as the article you linked to says.
Perhaps you know what he tried to say, but I don’t. Even if he meant what you believe him to have meant (which is still a wrong usage of the word), I still don’t see how this works as a meaningful objection to the article.
Yes, but you don’t try to learn true things from the points they make, or even to gently coax them out of innocent mistakes. You try to hand them their asses in front of an audience. And the audience already knows that mysterianism is silly. Insulting someone doesn’t teach them not to write incoherent posts, and doesn’t teach outsiders that incoherent posts are bad. It does teach us that you are badass, but we’ve sort of gotten the point by now.
Good points.
Except the part about being “badass”, which is probably the least like I feel, and is probably the least likely I ‘teach’ to anyone. “Weak-willed enough that I got counterproductively angry, and depressed” is closer to how I feel after I get more involved in a thread than I should have.
I should probably wait a couple hours before I reply to a post that annoys me—by then I’ll probably be able to better evaluate if a reply is actually worthwhile, and in what manner I should respond.
I find that more often the most useful approach turns out to be downvote then ignore. It is far too easy to get baited into conversations that are a lost cause from the moment they begin.
Well, your reply to me is much better. You exposed some flaws in my reasoning with actual arguments while being more polite even given the fact that my comment wasn’t. That’s what I like to see more of.
I used that word before the way I indicated. Not that you are wrong...but I usually look up words at Wikipedia or Merriam-Webster and when the definition seems fit use them for my purposes. Sure, that’s laziness on my side. But it might be useful to sometimes apply a bit of guesswork at what someone else could have meant on an international forum.
I guess. I just can’t identify with most people here so it’s hard to see me as a part of this community.
It’s not a guardian of truth. It grew from insanity, so others may have as well—from Dennett to Drescher, there’s no telling about the ideas of others until they open their mouths.
I choose a third alternative that’s less extreme.
The directionality isn’t symmetrical, it only goes one way. Wikipedia:
Personally I think that this call voting is indeed useless and belongs to places such as Youtube or other such sites where you can’t expect a meaningful discussion in the first place. Here, if a person disagrees with you, I believe she or he should post a counter argument instead of yelling “your are wrong!”, that is, giving a negative vote.
The problem with downvotes is that those who are downvoted are rarely people who know that they are wrong, otherwise they would have deliberately submitted something that they knew would be downvoted, in which case the downvotes would be expected and have little or no effect on the future behavior of the person.
In some cases downvotes might cause a person to reflect on what they have written. But that will only happen if the person believes that downvotes are evidence that their submissions are actually faulty rather than signaling that the person who downvoted did so for various other reasons than being right.
Even if all requirements for a successful downvote are met, the person might very well not be able to figure out how exactly they are wrong due to the change of a number associated with their submission. The information is simply not sufficient. Which will cause the person to either continue to express their opinion or avoid further discussion and continue to hold wrong beliefs.
With respect to the reputation system employed on lesswrong it is often argued that little information is better than no information. Yet humans can easily be overwhelmed by too much information. Especially if the information are easily misjudged and only provide little feedback. Such information might only add to the overall noise.
And even if the above mentioned problems wouldn’t exist, reputation systems might easily reinforce any groupthink, if only by causing those who disagree to be discouraged and those who agree to be rewarded.
If everyone was perfectly rational a reputation system would be a valueable tool. But lesswrong is open to everyone. Even if most of the voting behavior is currently free of bias and motivated cognition it might not stay that way for very long.
Take for example the voting pattern when it comes to plain English, easily digestible submissions, versus highly technical posts including math. A lot of the latter category receives much less upvotes. The writing of technical posts is actively discouraged by this inevitable effect of a reputation system.
Worst of all, any reputation system protects itself by making those who most benefit from it defend its value.
Well, there are two different aspects in Less Wrong system : the global karma of a person, and the score of a comment.
I agree that the “global karma of a person” is of mitigated use. It does sometimes give me a little kick to be more careful in writing on LW (and I’m probably not the only one), but only slightly, and it does have significant drawbacks.
But the score of one comment has a different purpose : the purpose is that a third party (not the one who posted the comment nor the one who put the upvote/downvote) can easily select comments worth to read and those which are not. In that regard, it works relatively well—not perfectly, but better than nothing. And in that regard, it doesn’t really matter if the OP understands why he is downvoted, and in that regard, explaining why you downvote does more harm than good—it decreases the signal/noise ratio (unless the explanation itself is very interesting, like it points to a fallacy that is not commonly recognized).
Less encouraged.
I didn’t vote down your post (or even see it until just now), but it came across as a bit disdainful while being written rather confusingly. The former is going to poorly dispose people toward your message, and the latter is going to poorly dispose people toward taking the trouble to respond to it. If you try rephrasing in a clearer way, you might see more discussion.
Then maybe, instead of just downvoting, these persons should have asked him to clarify and repharse his post. This would have actually led to an interesting dicussion, while downvoting gave nobody nothing. Maybe it should be possible to downvote a post only if you also reply to that post.
That would kill the main idea of downvoting which is to improve the signal/noise ratio by ensuring comments made by “trolls” just aren’t noticed anymore unless people really want to see them.
Downvoting does lead to abuses, and I do consider that downvoting deeb’s comment was not really needed, but forcing to make comments will kill the purpose, and not really prevent the abuses.
Khan Academy employs a reputation system such as lesswrong. What happened is that completely useless comments, e.g. “YES WE KHAN!!!!!! :)”, are voted up and drown all useful comments.
YouTube also employs a reputation system where people can upvote and downvote comments. And what happens?
Well, Less Wrong is a well-kept garden not a mass public community like YouTube.
The karma system is not perfect, but IMHO it does more good than harm (and I say that even if some of my comments were downvoted). “Chinese People Suck” would be quickly downvoted below threshold here. At least, I give a high (>90%) confidence to it.
I’d like to attest that I find the karma system (by which I understand not just the software but the way the community uses it) a huge blessing and part of LW’s appeal to me. It is a strong incentive to pause and ask myself if I even have something to say before I open my mouth around here (which is why I haven’t written a main blog post yet) rather than just fling crap at the wall like one does in the rest of the Internet.
The “downvotes vs replies” problem is, I think, for the most part a non-issue. Anyone who’s been here a bit will know that if (generic) you ask for clarification of your downvotes, people will generally provide as long as you’re not acting whiney or sore about it. And there will be nothing stopping you from constructively engaging them on the points raised (though beware to actually apply reading comprehension to what is said then, because people don’t like it when you fail to update).
Yes, I also see that a reputation system does have positive effects given certain circumstances. But would you want to have such a system employed on a global basis, where millions could downvote you for saying that there is no God? Obviously such a system would be really bad for the kind of people who read lesswrong and for the world as a whole.
That means that the use of the system on lesswrong is based on the assumption that it will only be used by people who are much like you and will therefore work well for you. But given that lesswrong is an open system, will it always stay that way? At what point is it going to fail on you, how will you notice, how do you set the threshold?
And given that the system works so well as to keep everyone who doesn’t think like you off lesswrong, how are you going to notice negative effects of groupthink? Do we trust our abilities to seek truth enough to notice when the system starts to discourage people who are actually less wrong than lesswrong?
Well, nothing lasts forever, supposedly. If in future Less Wrong’s quality gets diluted away, it won’t matter to me if it keeps using the vote system or something else because I won’t care to be on Less Wrong any more.
However, part of the function of the vote system is selection. To put it brutally, it drives away incompatible people (and signals positively to compatible ones). So I think LW will stay worthwhile for quite a while.
And yes, in a way this is one of your negatives from your other post which I actually think is a positive. If someone gets consistently downvoted, doesn’t get why, AND can’t ask and find out and update on that, then with some probability we can say we don’t want them here. I’m sure we lose some good people this way too, but the system’s better than nothing; at least what gets through the filter is much better than things would be without it.
Chinese People Suck
Downvoted for taking the too-obvious route.
Downvoted for pointing out the obvious.
As far as I can tell, there are no useful comments in the comments section. In the complete absence of anything of substance (a situation LW is not in danger of being), simple community applause lights floating up is understandable. The situation in the Q&A section, where there is substance, appears better.
Also you picked a page which looks like it’s largely populated by schoolchildren. Youtube is populated by, well, everyone. LW’s audience is strongly selected. I don’t know if I even need to say this, but it seems reasonable to expect the downvote system to be used more usefully on LW than on youtube.
My point is that the negative aspects of such a system are rarely compared to the positive aspects.
People say that the reputation system employed by lesswrong holds the trolls at bay and reduces noise. Yet when I am showing that reputation systems frequently fail at doing so, the same people argue that lesswrong is different and that’s why it works. Does it? Or does it just look like it works because lesswrong is different?
Do the positive effects really outweigh the negative?
The outside view is that someone complaining about being downvoted for specific reasons is usually wrong about such reasons. Perhaps someone could compile a list of cases.
That isn’t surprising. If I can correctly analyze my reasons for being downvoted, I can probably also figure out that complaining about it doesn’t get me anything I want.