But when I see a trend that suggests downvoting heuristics I think are bad I sometimes publicly lament those heuristics. For example, I see a lot of bad pattern matching downvoting where people say things that unexamined resemble theistic apologist arguments. Taking any position that could be considered political also seems to be subject to downvoting.
Outside of threads I’m personally involved in, I try to downvote any comment which seems detrimental to the overall signal-to-noise ratio on LW. Most often that means posts which are statistically illiterate, incoherent, obviously biased, or poorly written, which I imagine should be uncontroversial. Beyond content and style, though, it’s also possible for a post’s framing to lower the signal-to-noise ratio through a variety of knock-on effects.
Usually this happens by way of halo effects and their negative-affect equivalent (let’s call that a miasma effect, if it lacks a proper name): arguments matching religious apologia too closely, for example, tend to trigger a cluster of negative associations in our largely atheistic audience that prime it for confrontation even if the content itself is benign. Likewise for comments with political framing or drawing unwisely from political examples. I don’t usually click the downvote button on comments like these until there’s evidence of them actually causing problems, but that’s sufficiently common that I still end up burning a lot of votes on them.
I submit that this isn’t a bad heuristic. It’s one that shouldn’t be necessary if we were all free from emotive priming effects, but we clearly aren’t, and exposing ourselves to many sources of them isn’t going to help us get rid of the problem; in the meantime, discouraging such comments seems like a useful way of keeping the shouting down.
Outside of threads I’m personally involved in, I try to downvote any comment which seems detrimental to the overall signal-to-noise ratio on LW. Most often that means posts which are statistically illiterate, incoherent, obviously biased, or poorly written, which I imagine should be uncontroversial. Beyond content and style, though, it’s also possible for a post’s framing to lower the signal-to-noise ratio through a variety of knock-on effects.
Usually this happens by way of halo effects and their negative-affect equivalent (let’s call that a miasma effect, if it lacks a proper name): arguments matching religious apologia too closely, for example, tend to trigger a cluster of negative associations in our largely atheistic audience that prime it for confrontation even if the content itself is benign. Likewise for comments with political framing or drawing unwisely from political examples. I don’t usually click the downvote button on comments like these until there’s evidence of them actually causing problems, but that’s sufficiently common that I still end up burning a lot of votes on them.
I submit that this isn’t a bad heuristic. It’s one that shouldn’t be necessary if we were all free from emotive priming effects, but we clearly aren’t, and exposing ourselves to many sources of them isn’t going to help us get rid of the problem; in the meantime, discouraging such comments seems like a useful way of keeping the shouting down.