(This is an unrelated question about LW that I’d like the LW team to see, but don’t think needs its own post, so I’m posting it here.) I want to mention that it remains frustrating when someone says something like “I’m open to argument” or we’re already in the middle of a debate, I give them an argument, and just hear nothing back. I’ve actually kind of gotten used to it a bit, and don’t feel as frustrated as I used to feel but it’s still pretty much the strongest negative emotion I ever experience when participating on LW.
I believe there are good reasons to address this aside from my personal feelings, but I’m not sure if I’m being objective about that. So I’m interested to know whether this is something that’s on the LW team’s radar as a problem that could potentially be solved/ameliorated, or if they think it’s not worth solving or probably can’t be solved or it’s more of a personal problem than a community problem. (See this old feature suggestion which I believe I’ve also re-submitted more recently, which might be one way to try to address the problem.)
Ray has recently been advocating for a more general tagging system (kinda like Github and Discord but with tags optimized for LW-reactions like the ones in your feature suggestion), and the LW team has been more seriously exploring the idea of breaking voting down into two dimensions “agree/disagree” + “approve/disapprove”. My guess is that both of those would help a bit, though for your use-case it also seems important that you know the identity of who reacted what way.
I think both agree/disagree and approve/disapprove are toxic dimensions for evaluating quality discussions. Useful communication is about explaining and understanding relevant things, real-world truth and preference are secondary distractions. So lucid/confused (as opposed to clear/unclear) and relevant/misleading (as opposed to interesting/off-topic) seem like better choices.
I think both agree/disagree and approve/disapprove are toxic dimensions for evaluating quality discussions.
Hmm, but are they more toxic than whatever “upvote/downvote” currently means? The big constraining factor on things like this seems to me to be complexity and inferential distance of what the voting means. I would be worried that it would be much harder to get people to understand “lucid/confused” and “relevant/misleading” though I am not confident.
Within the hypothetical where the dimensions I suggest are better, fuzziness of upvote/downvote is better in the same way as uncertainty about facts is better than incorrect knowledge, even when the latter is easier to embrace than correct knowledge. In that hypothetical, moving from upvote/downvote to agree/disagree is a step in the wrong direction, even if the step in the right direction is too unwieldy to be worth making.
(This is an unrelated question about LW that I’d like the LW team to see, but don’t think needs its own post, so I’m posting it here.) I want to mention that it remains frustrating when someone says something like “I’m open to argument” or we’re already in the middle of a debate, I give them an argument, and just hear nothing back. I’ve actually kind of gotten used to it a bit, and don’t feel as frustrated as I used to feel but it’s still pretty much the strongest negative emotion I ever experience when participating on LW.
I believe there are good reasons to address this aside from my personal feelings, but I’m not sure if I’m being objective about that. So I’m interested to know whether this is something that’s on the LW team’s radar as a problem that could potentially be solved/ameliorated, or if they think it’s not worth solving or probably can’t be solved or it’s more of a personal problem than a community problem. (See this old feature suggestion which I believe I’ve also re-submitted more recently, which might be one way to try to address the problem.)
Ray has recently been advocating for a more general tagging system (kinda like Github and Discord but with tags optimized for LW-reactions like the ones in your feature suggestion), and the LW team has been more seriously exploring the idea of breaking voting down into two dimensions “agree/disagree” + “approve/disapprove”. My guess is that both of those would help a bit, though for your use-case it also seems important that you know the identity of who reacted what way.
I think both agree/disagree and approve/disapprove are toxic dimensions for evaluating quality discussions. Useful communication is about explaining and understanding relevant things, real-world truth and preference are secondary distractions. So lucid/confused (as opposed to clear/unclear) and relevant/misleading (as opposed to interesting/off-topic) seem like better choices.
*disagrees with and approves of this relevant, interesting, and non-confused comment*
Hmm, but are they more toxic than whatever “upvote/downvote” currently means? The big constraining factor on things like this seems to me to be complexity and inferential distance of what the voting means. I would be worried that it would be much harder to get people to understand “lucid/confused” and “relevant/misleading” though I am not confident.
Within the hypothetical where the dimensions I suggest are better, fuzziness of upvote/downvote is better in the same way as uncertainty about facts is better than incorrect knowledge, even when the latter is easier to embrace than correct knowledge. In that hypothetical, moving from upvote/downvote to agree/disagree is a step in the wrong direction, even if the step in the right direction is too unwieldy to be worth making.