I read your post in the other thread by Mitch_Porter, asking about why your post here got downvoted. As someone who would also have responded with the answer “uncountably many” and was in fact surprised to find that that wasn’t quickly established as the obvious correct answer, I thought I might come take a look.
I would guess that the (mild) downvoting on this post comes from the fact that after your first sentence, you stop talking about specific instances of decoherence and start talking about omniverses and probabilities of 1 and 0. your language is more technical than it needs to be and grammatically odd.
It is also so
it is absurd to suppose
if there be anything
contains only this one...among uncountably many
all of these fragments make me cringe and have to parse what you’re saying.
The way I would phrase this is lowering your expectations of the community’s willingness to wade through jargon and derogatory language. It isn’t that people won’t understand, it’s that they won’t want to read the comment.
Point specifically to that which is “derogatory” in the initial post. I don’t participate in LW to get upvoted, anyway, since that is merely a marker of groupthink (or correlates in assigning yay or boo ascriptions to a particular post for mere classical conditioning to take place). I didn’t use any jargon except the term “omniverse” which anyone equipped with Google could look up themselves. I suppose when writing comments on LW, in special cases (as in a technical topic), one must hold the hand of the reader, lest they become enraged by subtleties and novel syntactical arrangements of words.
The part where you say “it is absurd to suppose” when it isn’t made clear in plain English what it is that is absurd. However I mostly included the statement about derogatory comments in reference to your other comments.
Perhaps a better term than “technical jargon” would be “convoluted grammar.” I pointed out specific examples of phrasing I found unpleasant to read in my original reply.
Also someone else may have pointed this out but the general policy on lesswrong is not to vote on agree/disagree but on this comment was worth reading/was not worth reading. Saying you are not interested in upvotes is essentially saying you are not interested in contributing to the community. If you don’t want to explain yourself in a friendly and accessible way then you have no obligation to, but I think you will be the one who misses out.
Also someone else may have pointed this out but the general policy on lesswrong is not to vote on agree/disagree but on this comment was worth reading/was not worth reading.
No one “pointed this out” to me. But they did downvote whatever I said, without so much as a reasoned explanation. I seriously doubt that that is the actual universal employment of the voting mechanism, particularly since I’ve seen quite a few good posts on LW with numerous down-votes accorded to them. Perhaps my standards of “worthwhile reading” are too generous for the likes of LW’ers.
Saying you are not interested in upvotes is essentially saying you are not interested in contributing to the community.
No, I disagree that that is what I’m saying about the nature of not being interested in up-votes. I can still contribute without being up-voted, and I’m fine with that.
My grammar may be “convoluted” to those who do not take a liking to heady material (yes, I read difficult stuff all the time), so I can’t be blamed for slipping into what I find most comfortable, just as you do without any second thought.
I read your post in the other thread by Mitch_Porter, asking about why your post here got downvoted. As someone who would also have responded with the answer “uncountably many” and was in fact surprised to find that that wasn’t quickly established as the obvious correct answer, I thought I might come take a look.
I would guess that the (mild) downvoting on this post comes from the fact that after your first sentence, you stop talking about specific instances of decoherence and start talking about omniverses and probabilities of 1 and 0. your language is more technical than it needs to be and grammatically odd.
all of these fragments make me cringe and have to parse what you’re saying.
I hope this helps!
Yes, it does. Thanks. I suppose I should lower my expectations of the general community’s familiarity with “technical” subjects.
The way I would phrase this is lowering your expectations of the community’s willingness to wade through jargon and derogatory language. It isn’t that people won’t understand, it’s that they won’t want to read the comment.
Point specifically to that which is “derogatory” in the initial post. I don’t participate in LW to get upvoted, anyway, since that is merely a marker of groupthink (or correlates in assigning yay or boo ascriptions to a particular post for mere classical conditioning to take place). I didn’t use any jargon except the term “omniverse” which anyone equipped with Google could look up themselves. I suppose when writing comments on LW, in special cases (as in a technical topic), one must hold the hand of the reader, lest they become enraged by subtleties and novel syntactical arrangements of words.
The part where you say “it is absurd to suppose” when it isn’t made clear in plain English what it is that is absurd. However I mostly included the statement about derogatory comments in reference to your other comments.
Perhaps a better term than “technical jargon” would be “convoluted grammar.” I pointed out specific examples of phrasing I found unpleasant to read in my original reply.
Also someone else may have pointed this out but the general policy on lesswrong is not to vote on agree/disagree but on this comment was worth reading/was not worth reading. Saying you are not interested in upvotes is essentially saying you are not interested in contributing to the community. If you don’t want to explain yourself in a friendly and accessible way then you have no obligation to, but I think you will be the one who misses out.
No one “pointed this out” to me. But they did downvote whatever I said, without so much as a reasoned explanation. I seriously doubt that that is the actual universal employment of the voting mechanism, particularly since I’ve seen quite a few good posts on LW with numerous down-votes accorded to them. Perhaps my standards of “worthwhile reading” are too generous for the likes of LW’ers.
No, I disagree that that is what I’m saying about the nature of not being interested in up-votes. I can still contribute without being up-voted, and I’m fine with that.
My grammar may be “convoluted” to those who do not take a liking to heady material (yes, I read difficult stuff all the time), so I can’t be blamed for slipping into what I find most comfortable, just as you do without any second thought.