If it has three downvotes, it’s probably not worth seeing.
I find that seeing a comment with a lot of down-votes has the exact opposite effect on me. “Six down-votes! What crazy half-formed idea is Will_Newsome talking about now!?”
The quality control benefits of down-voting are mostly deterrence which requires people feel good about up-votes and bad when they get down-voted.
The quality control benefits of down-voting are mostly deterrence which requires people feel good about up-votes and bad when they get down-voted.
Which is pretty dangerous, on the whole. It’s reinforcement learning for meshing with local preconceptions. Luckily local preconceptions ’round these parts are pretty top notch relatively speaking, but unluckily they’re really suboptimal objectively speaking. This is extra dangerous for people like me who do a lot of associative learning. Please everyone, do be careful when it comes to letting people reward or punish you for thinking in certain ways.
It is, in principle, dangerous. But the vast majority of down-votes are for rhetoric rather than position. Usually, my comments which contradict local preconceptions are just low karma relative to the replies, not negative karma. Most down-votes are for rhetorical and stylistic violations rather than unpopular beliefs.
I’d say this goes for a lot of your down-votes, too. Especially if we include ‘paying insufficient attention to likely inferential distances’ as a rhetorical violation. Though of course at this point a number people may be especially sensitive to your comment quality and mediocre comments that would usually be ignored are down voted if your name is attached.
Thinking about what standards you should hold yourself to when it comes to choosing rhetoric and style is also an important kind of thinking though. Like, using the phrase “it seems to me as if” habitually is a cheap way to get karma but it’s also a good habit of thought. But sometimes my rhetoric is negatively reinforced when the only other option I had was in some should world where I wasn’t prodromal schizohrenic and so by letting people’s downvotes affect my perception of what I should or shouldn’t have been able to do it’s like I’m implicitly endorsing an inaccurate model of how justification should work or just how my mind is structured or how people should process justification when they have uncertainty about how others’ minds are structured. Policies spring from models, and letting policies be punished based on inaccurate models is like saying it’s okay to have inaccurate models. (Disclaimer: Policy debates always have fifteen trillion sides and fifteen gazillion ways to go meta, this is just one of them.)
(Note that it doesn’t necessarily matter that beliefs and policies tend to be mutually supporting rationalizations linked only in the mind of the believer.)
I find that seeing a comment with a lot of down-votes has the exact opposite effect on me. “Six down-votes! What crazy half-formed idea is Will_Newsome talking about now!?”
Fittingly, this comment currently has six upvotes. :-)
I find that seeing a comment with a lot of down-votes has the exact opposite effect on me. “Six down-votes! What crazy half-formed idea is Will_Newsome talking about now!?”
The quality control benefits of down-voting are mostly deterrence which requires people feel good about up-votes and bad when they get down-voted.
(Just teasing you, Will)
Which is pretty dangerous, on the whole. It’s reinforcement learning for meshing with local preconceptions. Luckily local preconceptions ’round these parts are pretty top notch relatively speaking, but unluckily they’re really suboptimal objectively speaking. This is extra dangerous for people like me who do a lot of associative learning. Please everyone, do be careful when it comes to letting people reward or punish you for thinking in certain ways.
It is, in principle, dangerous. But the vast majority of down-votes are for rhetoric rather than position. Usually, my comments which contradict local preconceptions are just low karma relative to the replies, not negative karma. Most down-votes are for rhetorical and stylistic violations rather than unpopular beliefs.
I’d say this goes for a lot of your down-votes, too. Especially if we include ‘paying insufficient attention to likely inferential distances’ as a rhetorical violation. Though of course at this point a number people may be especially sensitive to your comment quality and mediocre comments that would usually be ignored are down voted if your name is attached.
Thinking about what standards you should hold yourself to when it comes to choosing rhetoric and style is also an important kind of thinking though. Like, using the phrase “it seems to me as if” habitually is a cheap way to get karma but it’s also a good habit of thought. But sometimes my rhetoric is negatively reinforced when the only other option I had was in some should world where I wasn’t prodromal schizohrenic and so by letting people’s downvotes affect my perception of what I should or shouldn’t have been able to do it’s like I’m implicitly endorsing an inaccurate model of how justification should work or just how my mind is structured or how people should process justification when they have uncertainty about how others’ minds are structured. Policies spring from models, and letting policies be punished based on inaccurate models is like saying it’s okay to have inaccurate models. (Disclaimer: Policy debates always have fifteen trillion sides and fifteen gazillion ways to go meta, this is just one of them.)
(Note that it doesn’t necessarily matter that beliefs and policies tend to be mutually supporting rationalizations linked only in the mind of the believer.)
Fittingly, this comment currently has six upvotes. :-)