Update (2025/09/13 3AM PST): Clarified Comment Guideline notice. Added “Operationalising my recommendation” section. Added “What this will look like if my criticism is valid” section. Added Appendix with snapshot of conversation thread.
Update (2025/09/13 10AM PST): Replaced Comment Guideline with a Voting Guideline and Comment Request to be in accordance with LessWrong rules. Added “What this post is, and why you should care” section up front.
Final Update (2025/09/13 3PM PST): Minor grammatical changes for flow. Added context to the first comment exchange [Footnote 8]. Added a prediction to [Footnote 7] — I think no more updates are required. Added “Notice to new/returning readers”.
*** Notice to new/returning readers: This post has undergone a few updates (as above) but I believe is now in its final form. You are arriving at a good time — the storm has dissipated and the post should be more accessible than earlier iterations. ***
*** Voting Guideline:You should freely vote and react according to your views and LessWrong norms — I do not want to infringe upon this. ***
*** Comment Request: However, please allow me to make a request: if you do downvote this post and are willing to make that transparent, it would help me to operationalise the recommendation I put across in this post if you add a Reaction or a 30+ character comment prepended with “Downvote note:” on what to improve. ***
What this post is, and why you should care
A recommendation / feature request for the LessWrong platform
I state “we should devise mechanisms that provide an actionable route for low-quality contrarian posts/comments to become high-quality to improve the platform as a whole.”
I designed the post to self-referentially portray my recommendation in action.
Key terms used
Contrarian — I feel this is a standard term, I state it as someone using a “non-normative claim” and illustrate it as “Being Peculiar” or exhibiting “visionary arrogance”
“High quality content” — I state as “[content that is] usually heavily upvoted [on the platform]”
“Devise mechanisms” — I state as “implementing a system where negative votes on a post require the voter to cite their reason for negative voting — using either the Reaction system or a brief note of 30+ characters.”
Self-referential version: I describe a “comment according to my Comment Request” → “I respond” → “readers cast their vote” dynamic.
“The platform as a whole” — I describe LessWrong, and its central mission
Self-referential version: This post is my platform.
Reasoning chain
Premises: Contrarian authors spend hours putting together a post that contains a view that they may feel is well-reasoned, but then receive no feedback besides a couple of downvotes.
Self-referential version: I have determined a way to operationalise my recommendation upfront. I have suggested an opportunity to improve the LessWrong team’s model of supporting contrarian views with stability.
Inference: Contrarian views are too loosely dismissed on the platform “The only way you can be a visionary is to express a bunch of things that are, by definition, not the societal norm… [but] people with societally normative viewpoints will disagree with you.”
Self-referential version: Unfortunately, there are mechanisms that will suppress my contrarian views.
Conclusion: “I’m anticipating this post to be a straight shot to meta-irony: I have confidently made a non-normative claim, so expect a couple of negative post votes, absent of material feedback.”
Self-referential version: I have shown how a person confidently expressing non-normative ideas [me] is easy to dismiss, despite this being a necessary condition of being a visionary free-thinker.
Why I’m right, and what would change my mind
Using my great wit,[1] I self-referentially operationalised this post to illustrate my point.
What would change my mind is if people actually upvoted me.
What I’m uncertain about, and a steel-man counterargument
I’m uncertain about whether my writing style is suitable for this platform, or if I should defer to in-person interactions and maybe video content to express my ideas instead.
The strongest counterargument is that I should just write my post like an automaton,[2] instead of infusing the [attempts at] humour and illustrative devices that come naturally to me.
The problem with this is that writing like that isn’t fun to me and doesn’t come as naturally. In essence it would be a barrier to me contributing anything at all. I view that as a shame, because I do believe that all of my logic is robustly defensible and wholly laid out within the post.
Operationalising my recommendation
On this post[3] I will intentionally try to illustrate how I would see my recommendation playing out:
Contrarian post is made and receives downvote, with Downvoter comment providing justification.
Contrarian should agree or disagree with the Downvoter, and cast their vote accordingly.
Other readers can cast their votes on the comments of the Contrarian and the Downvoter — here we have rationally operationalised truth-seeking by transparently surfacing a weakness of the post via the Downvoters comment, hearing the Contrarian’s yielding or defence, and by being able to rate both sides.
The crux of my criticism aligns with this grid: we agree that high-quality contrarian posts/comments are the most valuable — they are usually heavily upvoted. It follows that we should devise mechanisms that provide an actionable route for low-quality contrarian posts/comments to become high-quality to improve the platform as a whole.[4]
The platform as a whole
I love the LessWrong platform. I think that it attracts an incredibly intelligent, well-read audience with a diverse range of perspectives.
I feel that the technical implementation of the site is exceptional — a daily, curated news-cycle, with emergent high quality posts for the homepage; posts are easily readable, and conversational threads are natural, well-moderated, and easy to parse; the Reaction system feels nicely implemented in a way where it is available to opt in to, but isn’t overpowering for folks that just want textual discourse.
As a lurker and engager of a variety of posts on the platform, I think that my own writing is decently LessWrong-y — I lay out my thoughts step-by-step and avoid logical inconsistencies or incongruously big leaps. I’m decently well-versed in the rationality literature and cite core works that my ideas build upon.
My criticism
Sometimes I spend hours putting together a post that I’m proud of, but then receive no feedback besides a couple of downvotes.
This is incredibly frustrating for two reasons:
Firstly — it seems that once voting on a post flips negative, the site won’t surface it anywhere near as prominently to readers.
Much more than that — receiving a negative vote with no qualitative feedback is solely disruptive to the author: there’s no signal for how to build on your ideas or frame them differently.
I’m decently skilled at channelling my attention well and good at tuning out noise, but I’d be lying if I were to say that I don’t find it off-putting when this happens.
I have written about a concept of “the tension between truth-seeking and societal harmony”. Authentically expressing what you feel to be true creates tension if it doesn’t match societal norms. This is a shame because I’m very pro- free-speech: I think that the world is made a better place by allowing more people to express their ideas about what is true.[5]
This is not being enabled on LessWrong: a down-voting agent can effectively silence my voice just because they disagree with me. On individual comments, “overall karma” and “agreement karma” are distinct, but for a post only a single voting metric exists.
Is this not directly opposed to LessWrong’s central mission?
LessWrong is an online forum/community that was founded with the purpose of perfecting the art of human[6] rationality.
Visionary arrogance
Now we get to some self-awareness.
Jeff Bezos, a visionary free-thinker, through Amazon advanced a cultural model with 16 core Leadership Principles (LPs) — but also some principles not codified as LPs. One of these is Amazon’s doc-writing culture, and another is the idea of embracing Being Peculiar.
From the “Being Peculiar” article linked:
“What kind of person owns being peculiar?” My answer, someone who is more concerned about their own legacy, than what others think of him. While this is admirable, it is also quite peculiar by American society’s standards.
This is hitting at the core of my argument — the only way you can be a visionary is to express a bunch of things that are, by definition, not the societal norm. Put another way: people with societally normative viewpoints will disagree with you.
I’m not equating myself to Jeff Bezos. What I’m saying is that if I were Jeff Bezos, perhaps my really insightful ideas would be buried by the current site setup.
This dynamic is especially true when someone expresses a lot of confidence in their non-normative ideas. This makes sense, because it pattern-matches as delusion which itself is off-putting. You could argue that maybe we should wait for someone to acquire a lot of status, e.g become a billionaire, and only then can we give them a platform for confidently expressing non-normative ideas. I’m not sure that I agree that this would be the best form of society though.
My recommendation
I think the site could be improved by implementing a system where negative votes on a post require the voter to cite their reason for negative voting — using either the Reaction system or a brief note of 30+ characters.
These reasons should be held to account: people should be able to see and downvote them if they are flawed.
I’m anticipating this post to be a straight shot to meta-irony: I have confidently made a non-normative claim, so expect a couple of negative post votes, absent of material feedback.
What this will look like if my criticism is valid
In this post I have presented a well-reasoned contrarian viewpoint:
Determined a way to operationalise my recommendation upfront
Suggested an opportunity to improve the LessWrong team’s model of supporting contrarian views with stability
Described mechanisms that suppress contrarian views
Described how a person confidently expressing non-normative ideas is easy to dismiss, despite this being a necessary condition of being a visionary free-thinker
This post and my comments are significantly downvoted, nobody has engaged with these four core points and the damage is done: my contrarian view is suppressed, my future posts and comments hold less weight, and I’m disillusioned by the capacity of folks to engage with contrarian viewpoints in good faith.[7]
Appendix
Snapshot of first comment exchange, taken 2025/09/13
Are you implying that this post (“Visionary arrogance and a criticism of LessWrong voting”) should be downvoted because it reaches the same conclusion as a 7-month old post which lacks half of the framing (“visionary arrogance”) that I use to describe voting behaviour motivations?
If so that sounds logically flawed to me, and so I both disagree and have downvoted you.
If you were not implying that and simply offering some additional context for me to refer to (the discussion in the comments is valuable), then I apologise and will revert my downvoting.
This is also use of hyperbole for humour — instead of “like an automaton”, precisely I mean that a common writing style on LW is to provide a numbered/bulleted list of principles.
“We say “human” rationality, because we’re most interested in how us humans can perform best given how our brains work (as opposed to the general rationality that’d apply to AIs and aliens too).”
This is the case as of 2025/09/13: “-15 karma from 10 votes on the post, −7 karma from 3 votes and −10 agreement karma from 3 votes on my first comment”. In response I have made 4 relatively small updates to the post, called out in the first line, to highlight the irony: I think that this validates my criticism and strengthens the post.
Update (2025/09/13, 3pm PST): The post at is currently at −17 karma from 12 votes. It has 17 comments (including my own).
I’ve made a few edits — not wholly-transformational, but admittedly making it easier for a reader to parse — since posting. These edits have come about directly as a result of discourse in the comments.
My moderately-strongly held view is that it is now in its final form and beautifully captures everything that I set out to do.
I’d be interested in anyone’s viewpoint upon a full re-read, if indeed they are willing to dedicate the time — I totally get it if not (it’s the weekend)!
I’m not sure that this final form will be effectively surfaced to any new readers on the site, since the karma is so low. I have two ongoing Private Conversations, with whom I am providing this same update, and I hope I may be able to at least solicit final form feedback from them.
My vision: perhaps now the post is high-quality and will accrue positive karma. That is to say that I’m calling the karmic bottom at −17.
I explicitly moderated my response by saying that I apologise and will revert my criticism of my interpretation of their comment if my interpretation is incorrect.
When I received the comment, the post vote tally was at “-3”, and I was presented with a Bayesian to evaluate: P (Comment was provided in accordance with my explicit request | I made an explicit request and post vote tally is at “-3″)
I admit that to better operationalise this I could have clarified for commenters that were following my Comment Guideline to explicitly“prepend [their comment] with “Downvote note:” ” — I have made this edit to the post.
Update (2025/09/13): The Presumed Downvoter followed up to clarify that they were not implying a reason to downvote this post, but they acknowledge that me reaching that conclusion was reasonable. Per the terms that I explicitly communicated, I’ve flipped my votes to approve and agree with their comment. I leave the rest of my comment unchanged, as a record of how I would engage with someone who was providing a reason to downvote that I disagree with.
In practice, I wouldn’t transparently say “If so that sounds logically flawed to me, and so I both disagree and have downvoted you.” which is unnecessarily confrontational — I would just do it silently. I only state it transparently here as part of operationalising my vision for deriving more signal from downvotes.
Visionary arrogance and a criticism of LessWrong voting
Posted (2025/09/12 3PM PST)
Update (2025/09/13 3AM PST): Clarified Comment Guideline notice. Added “Operationalising my recommendation” section. Added “What this will look like if my criticism is valid” section. Added Appendix with snapshot of conversation thread.
Update (2025/09/13 10AM PST): Replaced Comment Guideline with a Voting Guideline and Comment Request to be in accordance with LessWrong rules. Added “What this post is, and why you should care” section up front.
Final Update (2025/09/13 3PM PST): Minor grammatical changes for flow. Added context to the first comment exchange [Footnote 8]. Added a prediction to [Footnote 7] — I think no more updates are required. Added “Notice to new/returning readers”.
*** Notice to new/returning readers: This post has undergone a few updates (as above) but I believe is now in its final form. You are arriving at a good time — the storm has dissipated and the post should be more accessible than earlier iterations. ***
*** Voting Guideline: You should freely vote and react according to your views and LessWrong norms — I do not want to infringe upon this. ***
*** Comment Request: However, please allow me to make a request: if you do downvote this post and are willing to make that transparent, it would help me to operationalise the recommendation I put across in this post if you add a Reaction or a 30+ character comment prepended with “Downvote note:” on what to improve. ***
What this post is, and why you should care
A recommendation / feature request for the LessWrong platform
I state “we should devise mechanisms that provide an actionable route for low-quality contrarian posts/comments to become high-quality to improve the platform as a whole.”
I designed the post to self-referentially portray my recommendation in action.
Key terms used
Contrarian — I feel this is a standard term, I state it as someone using a “non-normative claim” and illustrate it as “Being Peculiar” or exhibiting “visionary arrogance”
“High quality content” — I state as “[content that is] usually heavily upvoted [on the platform]”
“Devise mechanisms” — I state as “implementing a system where negative votes on a post require the voter to cite their reason for negative voting — using either the Reaction system or a brief note of 30+ characters.”
Self-referential version: I describe a “comment according to my Comment Request” → “I respond” → “readers cast their vote” dynamic.
“The platform as a whole” — I describe LessWrong, and its central mission
Self-referential version: This post is my platform.
Reasoning chain
Premises: Contrarian authors spend hours putting together a post that contains a view that they may feel is well-reasoned, but then receive no feedback besides a couple of downvotes.
Self-referential version: I have determined a way to operationalise my recommendation upfront. I have suggested an opportunity to improve the LessWrong team’s model of supporting contrarian views with stability.
Inference: Contrarian views are too loosely dismissed on the platform “The only way you can be a visionary is to express a bunch of things that are, by definition, not the societal norm… [but] people with societally normative viewpoints will disagree with you.”
Self-referential version: Unfortunately, there are mechanisms that will suppress my contrarian views.
Conclusion: “I’m anticipating this post to be a straight shot to meta-irony: I have confidently made a non-normative claim, so expect a couple of negative post votes, absent of material feedback.”
Self-referential version: I have shown how a person confidently expressing non-normative ideas [me] is easy to dismiss, despite this being a necessary condition of being a visionary free-thinker.
Why I’m right, and what would change my mind
Using my great wit,[1] I self-referentially operationalised this post to illustrate my point.
What would change my mind is if people actually upvoted me.
What I’m uncertain about, and a steel-man counterargument
I’m uncertain about whether my writing style is suitable for this platform, or if I should defer to in-person interactions and maybe video content to express my ideas instead.
The strongest counterargument is that I should just write my post like an automaton,[2] instead of infusing the [attempts at] humour and illustrative devices that come naturally to me.
The problem with this is that writing like that isn’t fun to me and doesn’t come as naturally. In essence it would be a barrier to me contributing anything at all. I view that as a shame, because I do believe that all of my logic is robustly defensible and wholly laid out within the post.
Operationalising my recommendation
On this post[3] I will intentionally try to illustrate how I would see my recommendation playing out:
Contrarian post is made and receives downvote, with Downvoter comment providing justification.
Contrarian should agree or disagree with the Downvoter, and cast their vote accordingly.
Other readers can cast their votes on the comments of the Contrarian and the Downvoter — here we have rationally operationalised truth-seeking by transparently surfacing a weakness of the post via the Downvoters comment, hearing the Contrarian’s yielding or defence, and by being able to rate both sides.
Prior context
Automatic Rate Limiting on LessWrong suggests a stable grid dynamic:
Low-quality consensus posts/comments
(Usually somewhat upvoted, or
heavily upvoted when they’re funny
or particularly emotionally resonant)
High-quality consensus posts/comments
(Usually pretty upvoted)
Low-quality contrarian posts/comments
(Usually somewhat downvoted, or
heavily downvoted if they’re rude)
High-quality contrarian posts/comments
(Usually heavily upvoted)
The crux of my criticism aligns with this grid: we agree that high-quality contrarian posts/comments are the most valuable — they are usually heavily upvoted. It follows that we should devise mechanisms that provide an actionable route for low-quality contrarian posts/comments to become high-quality to improve the platform as a whole.[4]
The platform as a whole
I love the LessWrong platform. I think that it attracts an incredibly intelligent, well-read audience with a diverse range of perspectives.
I feel that the technical implementation of the site is exceptional — a daily, curated news-cycle, with emergent high quality posts for the homepage; posts are easily readable, and conversational threads are natural, well-moderated, and easy to parse; the Reaction system feels nicely implemented in a way where it is available to opt in to, but isn’t overpowering for folks that just want textual discourse.
As a lurker and engager of a variety of posts on the platform, I think that my own writing is decently LessWrong-y — I lay out my thoughts step-by-step and avoid logical inconsistencies or incongruously big leaps. I’m decently well-versed in the rationality literature and cite core works that my ideas build upon.
My criticism
Sometimes I spend hours putting together a post that I’m proud of, but then receive no feedback besides a couple of downvotes.
This is incredibly frustrating for two reasons:
Firstly — it seems that once voting on a post flips negative, the site won’t surface it anywhere near as prominently to readers.
Much more than that — receiving a negative vote with no qualitative feedback is solely disruptive to the author: there’s no signal for how to build on your ideas or frame them differently.
I’m decently skilled at channelling my attention well and good at tuning out noise, but I’d be lying if I were to say that I don’t find it off-putting when this happens.
I have written about a concept of “the tension between truth-seeking and societal harmony”. Authentically expressing what you feel to be true creates tension if it doesn’t match societal norms. This is a shame because I’m very pro- free-speech: I think that the world is made a better place by allowing more people to express their ideas about what is true.[5]
This is not being enabled on LessWrong: a down-voting agent can effectively silence my voice just because they disagree with me. On individual comments, “overall karma” and “agreement karma” are distinct, but for a post only a single voting metric exists.
Is this not directly opposed to LessWrong’s central mission?
Visionary arrogance
Now we get to some self-awareness.
Jeff Bezos, a visionary free-thinker, through Amazon advanced a cultural model with 16 core Leadership Principles (LPs) — but also some principles not codified as LPs. One of these is Amazon’s doc-writing culture, and another is the idea of embracing Being Peculiar.
From the “Being Peculiar” article linked:
This is hitting at the core of my argument — the only way you can be a visionary is to express a bunch of things that are, by definition, not the societal norm. Put another way: people with societally normative viewpoints will disagree with you.
I’m not equating myself to Jeff Bezos. What I’m saying is that if I were Jeff Bezos, perhaps my really insightful ideas would be buried by the current site setup.
This dynamic is especially true when someone expresses a lot of confidence in their non-normative ideas. This makes sense, because it pattern-matches as delusion which itself is off-putting. You could argue that maybe we should wait for someone to acquire a lot of status, e.g become a billionaire, and only then can we give them a platform for confidently expressing non-normative ideas. I’m not sure that I agree that this would be the best form of society though.
My recommendation
I think the site could be improved by implementing a system where negative votes on a post require the voter to cite their reason for negative voting — using either the Reaction system or a brief note of 30+ characters.
These reasons should be held to account: people should be able to see and downvote them if they are flawed.
I’m anticipating this post to be a straight shot to meta-irony: I have confidently made a non-normative claim, so expect a couple of negative post votes, absent of material feedback.
What this will look like if my criticism is valid
In this post I have presented a well-reasoned contrarian viewpoint:
Determined a way to operationalise my recommendation upfront
Suggested an opportunity to improve the LessWrong team’s model of supporting contrarian views with stability
Described mechanisms that suppress contrarian views
Described how a person confidently expressing non-normative ideas is easy to dismiss, despite this being a necessary condition of being a visionary free-thinker
This post and my comments are significantly downvoted, nobody has engaged with these four core points and the damage is done: my contrarian view is suppressed, my future posts and comments hold less weight, and I’m disillusioned by the capacity of folks to engage with contrarian viewpoints in good faith.[7]
Appendix
Snapshot of first comment exchange, taken 2025/09/13
Post at −15 overall karma [10 votes] —
[Presumed][8] Downvoter (+4 overall karma [4 votes], +3 agreement karma [3 votes]):
Contrarian (-7 overall karma [3 votes], −10 agreement karma [3 votes]):
This is use of hyperbole for [attempted] comic effect.
This is also use of hyperbole for humour — instead of “like an automaton”, precisely I mean that a common writing style on LW is to provide a numbered/bulleted list of principles.
I could alternatively use the word platform.
My “criticism” is that this is not happening currently,
But then allowing society to diligently give feedback, from simple disagreement up to structured punishment.
“We say “human” rationality, because we’re most interested in how us humans can perform best given how our brains work (as opposed to the general rationality that’d apply to AIs and aliens too).”
This is the case as of 2025/09/13: “-15 karma from 10 votes on the post, −7 karma from 3 votes and −10 agreement karma from 3 votes on my first comment”. In response I have made 4 relatively small updates to the post, called out in the first line, to highlight the irony: I think that this validates my criticism and strengthens the post.
Update (2025/09/13, 3pm PST): The post at is currently at −17 karma from 12 votes. It has 17 comments (including my own).
I’ve made a few edits — not wholly-transformational, but admittedly making it easier for a reader to parse — since posting. These edits have come about directly as a result of discourse in the comments.
My moderately-strongly held view is that it is now in its final form and beautifully captures everything that I set out to do.
I’d be interested in anyone’s viewpoint upon a full re-read, if indeed they are willing to dedicate the time — I totally get it if not (it’s the weekend)!
I’m not sure that this final form will be effectively surfaced to any new readers on the site, since the karma is so low. I have two ongoing Private Conversations, with whom I am providing this same update, and I hope I may be able to at least solicit final form feedback from them.
My vision: perhaps now the post is high-quality and will accrue positive karma. That is to say that I’m calling the karmic bottom at −17.
I explicitly moderated my response by saying that I apologise and will revert my criticism of my interpretation of their comment if my interpretation is incorrect.
When I received the comment, the post vote tally was at “-3”, and I was presented with a Bayesian to evaluate: P (Comment was provided in accordance with my explicit request | I made an explicit request and post vote tally is at “-3″)
I admit that to better operationalise this I could have clarified for commenters that were following my Comment Guideline to explicitly “prepend [their comment] with “Downvote note:” ” — I have made this edit to the post.
Update (2025/09/13): The Presumed Downvoter followed up to clarify that they were not implying a reason to downvote this post, but they acknowledge that me reaching that conclusion was reasonable. Per the terms that I explicitly communicated, I’ve flipped my votes to approve and agree with their comment. I leave the rest of my comment unchanged, as a record of how I would engage with someone who was providing a reason to downvote that I disagree with.
In practice, I wouldn’t transparently say “If so that sounds logically flawed to me, and so I both disagree and have downvoted you.” which is unnecessarily confrontational — I would just do it silently. I only state it transparently here as part of operationalising my vision for deriving more signal from downvotes.