There has been at least one occasion when I’ve posted something despite correctly expecting it to be downvoted. In that case it was a topic where I felt the LW community was letting politeness/pro-social-ness get in the way of rationality/actually-being-right.
My script for downloading all comments of a user has been updated to allow sorting by votes. After sorting, scroll to the bottom to see the lowest karma comments.
Going through some now. Preliminary findings: looking at the most downvoted comments a user ever made is a really good way to induce attribution bias. (“You people are jerks!”)
Me too, but even more interesting would be lowest karma comments of mediocre contributors. The high karma contributors are rarely downvoted when they formulate an idea, because people suppose that even if it sounds crazy it mustn’t be so since it originated from an elite contributor. Therefore I suppose that lowest karma comments of high karma contributors would mostly be trivial snarky remarks downvoted for incompatibility of sense of humor. At least this is my hypothesis—let it be tested, if we can collect such comments somehow.
Therefore I suppose that lowest karma comments of high karma contributors would mostly be trivial snarky remarks downvoted for incompatibility of sense of humor. At least this is my hypothesis—let it be tested, if we can collect such comments somehow.
In response to Jack’s expression of interest I went used Wei_Dai’s script to download all my comments and had a search through with some regex. By approximate count the greatest number of downvoted comments were jests of the type you mentioned, followed by comments of the form “I don’t approve of the grandparent either but your specific criticism Y is wrong for this logical reason”. The lowest vote that I spotted was −6 for a comment along the lines of “I fundamentally disagree with your accusations of me and do not wish to continue this conversation”.
The selection here is somewhat biased in as much as I am comfortable deleting comments if for any reason a conversation is unsatisfactory to me. There are quite possibly comments or jokes that would have gone into free-fall if I did not delete them when they reached −3 in 10 seconds flat. The downvoted comments that remain I either still endorse, consider important for the conversation to make sense, haven’t noticed or don’t care about enough to click on. (This isn’t to say that deleting a comment indicates that I do not endorse it entirely. I also have no problem with choosing my battles.)
I’m afraid Jack would be disappointed in that few of the most downvoted comments seem to be about object level subject matter. Or, if they are, it is object level conversation about something that people are… passionate about. It isn’t a source of ideas I have that people most disagree with, which may be interesting to see!
There has been at least one occasion when I’ve posted something despite correctly expecting it to be downvoted. In that case it was a topic where I felt the LW community was letting politeness/pro-social-ness get in the way of rationality/actually-being-right.
I’d love to see a collection of the lowest karma comments of high karma contributors.
My script for downloading all comments of a user has been updated to allow sorting by votes. After sorting, scroll to the bottom to see the lowest karma comments.
Awesome! Thanks.
Going through some now. Preliminary findings: looking at the most downvoted comments a user ever made is a really good way to induce attribution bias. (“You people are jerks!”)
This was not the karma I predicted for this comment.
Me too, but even more interesting would be lowest karma comments of mediocre contributors. The high karma contributors are rarely downvoted when they formulate an idea, because people suppose that even if it sounds crazy it mustn’t be so since it originated from an elite contributor. Therefore I suppose that lowest karma comments of high karma contributors would mostly be trivial snarky remarks downvoted for incompatibility of sense of humor. At least this is my hypothesis—let it be tested, if we can collect such comments somehow.
In response to Jack’s expression of interest I went used Wei_Dai’s script to download all my comments and had a search through with some regex. By approximate count the greatest number of downvoted comments were jests of the type you mentioned, followed by comments of the form “I don’t approve of the grandparent either but your specific criticism Y is wrong for this logical reason”. The lowest vote that I spotted was −6 for a comment along the lines of “I fundamentally disagree with your accusations of me and do not wish to continue this conversation”.
The selection here is somewhat biased in as much as I am comfortable deleting comments if for any reason a conversation is unsatisfactory to me. There are quite possibly comments or jokes that would have gone into free-fall if I did not delete them when they reached −3 in 10 seconds flat. The downvoted comments that remain I either still endorse, consider important for the conversation to make sense, haven’t noticed or don’t care about enough to click on. (This isn’t to say that deleting a comment indicates that I do not endorse it entirely. I also have no problem with choosing my battles.)
I’m afraid Jack would be disappointed in that few of the most downvoted comments seem to be about object level subject matter. Or, if they are, it is object level conversation about something that people are… passionate about. It isn’t a source of ideas I have that people most disagree with, which may be interesting to see!
Can you please give us more information? Or even better, link to the actual instance.