It would be plausible that someone could reject the argument and reject the premise. It is not plausible to claim that it is not an argument at all.
Ok. So help me out here, what is the premise I was missing?
But to me it seems to touch on the essential issue: Feminist memes are incompatible with HPMoR and feminism would be much improved by becoming more like Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.
If you phrase the “essential issue”, that way, then I agree denotationaly but disagree connotationaly. Sure there are bad feminist memes (this shouldn’t be surprising, almost every movement has bad memes), and there are definite trends in feminism which are outright awful. There’s a heavy anti-science attitude in a large part of the feminist movement, and feminism in many forms almost raises identity politics to a weird combination of an art form and a religion. Lots of things could benefit from being more like HPMoR. But that doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t also benefit from some aspects of feminism, it doesn’t mean that the (by and large) healthy memes in feminism are incompatible, and it doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t benefit by taking those ideas into account.
(Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue. It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.)
The only time I’ve been (or at least noticed being) mass-downvoted, it was immediately after having some slight involvement in a discussion of feminism or PUAistry or something of the kind, and making some comments on what, for want of better terminology, I’ll call the pro-women side. I just went looking to see if I could find the incident in question to check my facts; I didn’t (though I didn’t spend ages looking) but did turn up a remark from someone else that they’d seen that happen. I think there is very good evidence for at least one LW participant who has made a habit of punishing people for feministish opinions by this sort of mass-downvoting.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
It seems to me that this isn’t “controversy” but outright abuse, and the kind of abuse that merits severe sanctions, because (1) it poisons the environment for everyone and (2) it seems like an attempt at coercive manipulation and coercive manipulation is generally harmful. I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”...
I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”
As far as I know that feature isn’t implemented. It would certainly be something that could be implemented if it turned out to be sufficiently desired. This would catch lazy mass-downvoters and force dedicated mass-downvoters to use a little more effort and patience.
I wasn’t (for the avoidance of doubt) conjecturing that there’s already a nice UI feature where you click a button and it says “wedrifid has downvoted JoshuaZ’s last 20 comments” but, rather, that (1) the information is present in the system somewhere and (2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
(1) the information is present in the system somewhere
It seems somewhat likely based on the first incarnation of the monthly karma feature.
(2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
This part is the unlikely part. A (system) administrator yes, if (1). A moderator, I doubt it.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
Flash downvoting happens occasionally, and people post about it once in a while. I tend to get it when talking about MWI and instrumentalism, for example. I recall others mention it in connection with other topics. I agree that it is an underhanded tactics and a nuisance, but probably no more than that, and is hardly worth the admins’ time or the potential effort of the code change required to log every vote or to limit the number of targeted downvotes per user per day or something, or to do anything semi-automated. There already is a trivial inconvenience of not being able to access the vote button from the user view, and I don’t believe that a determined attacker will find it difficult to bypass more serious measures.
If this is not the kind of abuse of the system that a moderator should invest time in dealing with, where do you think the line should be drawn for their intervention?
A utilitarian approach would be to weigh the benefits of dealing with rare occurrences like this against those of other useful tasks, like getting bugs fixed, features added and what not. Not being one of the admins, I have no idea what the pressures are.
The reason why it might be a good idea for the admins to stomp on such behaviour isn’t just that the behaviour is harmful in itself, it’s to establish a culture of not doing that sort of thing.
The votes must all be logged already (or something functionally equivalent) because the system already knows to stop you upvoting or downvoting the same thing twice. Providing a UI to make it easy for admins to look for mass-downvoting would be the trickier thing, and indeed it might not be worth the effort. Though, on the whole, I think it probably would be, in order to establish LW as the sort of place where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue.
It couldn’t be me. I had already downvoted most of your feminism politics comments on perceived merit at the time I noticed them in the recent comments thread so cannot downvote further.
It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.
It was briefly intriguing once, three years ago. Now it is tiresome and predictable.
Ok. So help me out here, what is the premise I was missing?
If you phrase the “essential issue”, that way, then I agree denotationaly but disagree connotationaly. Sure there are bad feminist memes (this shouldn’t be surprising, almost every movement has bad memes), and there are definite trends in feminism which are outright awful. There’s a heavy anti-science attitude in a large part of the feminist movement, and feminism in many forms almost raises identity politics to a weird combination of an art form and a religion. Lots of things could benefit from being more like HPMoR. But that doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t also benefit from some aspects of feminism, it doesn’t mean that the (by and large) healthy memes in feminism are incompatible, and it doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t benefit by taking those ideas into account.
(Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue. It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.)
The only time I’ve been (or at least noticed being) mass-downvoted, it was immediately after having some slight involvement in a discussion of feminism or PUAistry or something of the kind, and making some comments on what, for want of better terminology, I’ll call the pro-women side. I just went looking to see if I could find the incident in question to check my facts; I didn’t (though I didn’t spend ages looking) but did turn up a remark from someone else that they’d seen that happen. I think there is very good evidence for at least one LW participant who has made a habit of punishing people for feministish opinions by this sort of mass-downvoting.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
It seems to me that this isn’t “controversy” but outright abuse, and the kind of abuse that merits severe sanctions, because (1) it poisons the environment for everyone and (2) it seems like an attempt at coercive manipulation and coercive manipulation is generally harmful. I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”...
As far as I know that feature isn’t implemented. It would certainly be something that could be implemented if it turned out to be sufficiently desired. This would catch lazy mass-downvoters and force dedicated mass-downvoters to use a little more effort and patience.
I wasn’t (for the avoidance of doubt) conjecturing that there’s already a nice UI feature where you click a button and it says “wedrifid has downvoted JoshuaZ’s last 20 comments” but, rather, that (1) the information is present in the system somewhere and (2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
It seems somewhat likely based on the first incarnation of the monthly karma feature.
This part is the unlikely part. A (system) administrator yes, if (1). A moderator, I doubt it.
Yeah, you might be right; perhaps the only way of getting at it is querying the database directly.
Flash downvoting happens occasionally, and people post about it once in a while. I tend to get it when talking about MWI and instrumentalism, for example. I recall others mention it in connection with other topics. I agree that it is an underhanded tactics and a nuisance, but probably no more than that, and is hardly worth the admins’ time or the potential effort of the code change required to log every vote or to limit the number of targeted downvotes per user per day or something, or to do anything semi-automated. There already is a trivial inconvenience of not being able to access the vote button from the user view, and I don’t believe that a determined attacker will find it difficult to bypass more serious measures.
If this is not the kind of abuse of the system that a moderator should invest time in dealing with, where do you think the line should be drawn for their intervention?
A utilitarian approach would be to weigh the benefits of dealing with rare occurrences like this against those of other useful tasks, like getting bugs fixed, features added and what not. Not being one of the admins, I have no idea what the pressures are.
The reason why it might be a good idea for the admins to stomp on such behaviour isn’t just that the behaviour is harmful in itself, it’s to establish a culture of not doing that sort of thing.
The votes must all be logged already (or something functionally equivalent) because the system already knows to stop you upvoting or downvoting the same thing twice. Providing a UI to make it easy for admins to look for mass-downvoting would be the trickier thing, and indeed it might not be worth the effort. Though, on the whole, I think it probably would be, in order to establish LW as the sort of place where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
It couldn’t be me. I had already downvoted most of your feminism politics comments on perceived merit at the time I noticed them in the recent comments thread so cannot downvote further.
It was briefly intriguing once, three years ago. Now it is tiresome and predictable.