Moreover, this whole posting system is stupid in that it doesn’t allow “comments below threshold” to be seen. Why not minimize them, but allow them to be expanded?
Jake, you may have the potential to become a productive long-term contributor to this site. You definitely have the potential to alienate all your readers and get yourself downvoted into oblivion, since that’s already happening. Why is it happening?
First, you’re political, you have a strong political agenda. That inherently causes you problems regardless of the agenda, because political activists make demands, and everyone is already busy living their lives. People are not strolling through life waiting for someone to grab them by the throat and shout the truth at them. So you definitely need to go much slower here, rather than dumping a reading list on everyone and saying “these authors solved politics”, while simultaneously saying that the truth about these matters is obvious and simple.
Second, your immediate response to getting into difficulty is to start arguing, at considerable length, that the site should function differently, that it should be possible to make posts of unlimited length, that the people who downvoted you are authoritarians and communist idiots, etc. You are exhibiting an instant persecution complex. That is something you must outgrow if you want to be politically effective, and not just a righteous street preacher ignored by passers-by.
That inherently causes you problems regardless of the agenda, because political activists make demands, and everyone is already busy living their lives.
It’s like a low-information mind saying “I’m sick and tired of having AIDS, take your virus-destroying nanobot offer and go bother someone else!” I guess in that situation, you kind of scratch your head, and then say something like “OK, Darwin at work. Seeya.”
Well, see, currently you don’t have any empirical evidence that your nanobot cure won’t kill me swiftly and I suspect it would, so your apparent insistence that I inject myself with it right here on the spot sounds a lot like those black plague merchants to me. I would be in favor of testing the nanobot cure (assuming the nanobots aren’t self replicating), but please don’t start the testing with life humans.
You don’t get to make a claim and then place the burden on others to step up and shoot holes in it. Unlike people, bold claims start out guilty and remain so until proven innocent.
Instead, start by providing reasonably non-ambiguous ways to measure constructs like “properly-functioning”, “freedom” and “production”, then show research or analyses supporting the correlation you want to claim. (The short form of the foregoing: “citation needed”.)
Drop the second part of the claim which is pure emotional appeal and metaphor (“machinery”, “supreme”, “violent”), but otherwise content-free.
Assuming the correlation exists, also investigate alternative explanations, acknowledging when one of these cannot be ruled immediately out by argument or by observation, so that further tests are needed.
I don’t want to say too much about the pros and cons of the LW interface, except that entry barriers do help to keep out spammers, crackpots, cultists, and others who would only come to talk, not to listen. It’s proving possible to talk with you, so, we’ll see how that ends up. I’ll let other people who have more insight into the logic of LW’s existing arrangements defend them.
I’m more interested in how your politics will play out here. I see you as a representative of a faction of opinion I’ll call Rational Transhuman Freedom. You mention Hayek and Ron Paul, but you also talk about nanobots and AGIs, and you’re big on rationality. It’s extropian Objectivism.
I have had to ask myself, what is the political sensibility of Less Wrong? I don’t mean the affiliations named in a poll, I mean the political agenda that is implicitly being expressed by people’s attitudes and priorities. In this regard, I find the emphasis on identifying which charities are the most important and effective to be the best clue. People just don’t debate policy, and how the state should act, at all. Instead they debate what the most effectively altruistic use of their spare change would be. I don’t actually know how to characterize this as a political attitude—perhaps it’s pre-political, it’s a sign of a community not yet forced to engage with the state and with political ideologies—but it’s certainly not hipster apathy.
Of course there is also an aversion to political discussion, as a big distraction, as the topic where people are most likely to become stupid, and as just not a productive way to test one’s rationality skills. On the Singularity side, there is also yet another transpolitical attitude present, a sort of monastic-slash-alchemical desire to not become entangled with the fallen world of mundane affairs, in favor of performing the great working whereby a friendly demiurge will be invoked to set it right. The world can be awful but that doesn’t mean you should run off and join the melee, because it has always been like this, and the real change will only come from superintelligence.
However, there truly are people here who are eager to use rationality to make a better world right now, and this is where LW might eventually develop some explicit stances regarding pre-Singularity politics. I consider the recent posts about Leverage Research to be one emerging political current (it had precursors, e.g. in Giles’s series on “Altruist Support”); it’s a maximalist expression of the impulse behind the discussion about optimal charities. Jake, when it comes to people making a political choice, I think this is the real competitor to the faction of Rational Transhuman Freedom,and it will be very interesting to see how that dialogue plays out, if the discussion ever manages to rise to that level.
These are competing utopianisms. Probably they express different aspects of the human utility function. Partisans of the Freedom agenda can be very eloquent when they talk about suffering caused by government, but the flip side of their political methodology is that you’re not allowed to use government to solve problems either, and this is what galls the defenders of more familiar, “statist” ideas of governance. Pursuing the Freedom agenda ends up mostly being about giving individuals a chance to flourish under their own power.
The other utopianism, exemplified by Leverage’s plan for the world, is the one that wants to solve everyone’s problems. Leverage does not presently talk about coercion. Instead, they are psychological utopians, who think that if they’re smart enough, they can figure out how to get everyone to work together and behave decently towards each other. Advocates of Freedom are willing to talk about the wonders of spontaneous order, but politically they leave the details to the market and to civil society; their agenda is to starve the beast, topple Leviathan, pare back the state. As I said, it remains to be seen how this polarity will play out here, but certainly history shows that it can become a deadly rivalry.
Another intellectual challenge that might show up for you here is the critique of libertarianism produced by “Mencius Moldbug”, who is making a serious effort to revive pre-democratic ideas about how society ought to work. Mencius’s argument is that given human nature, there must always be authority, and we are better off when we have a political culture which accepts this, and understands that the good life is to be found by having good rulers. Vladimir_M is a Mencius reader, and there must be others here.
I believe it’s rational to allow them to talk. I’m a free speech absolutist.
No you are not. You do not believe that random strangers should be able to enter your house at their convenience so that they may loudly share their opinions with you in your living room. Lesswrong is similarly not obliged to provide a forum for content that provides negative utility to its users.
Seriously, dude, calm down. I agree with your politics (the majority, albeit a small majority, of LW is libertarian) and I still find you obnoxious. If convincing people that your politics is best is your goal, consider how that goal is best met: Is that answer really writing walls of aggressive text on a site that has a small and overtly apolitical userbase?
This is not a political forum. Politics is generally considered off-topic here, and statements of political views will generally be downvoted immediately regardless of other content, largely for reasons outlined in this post.
that proclaimed itself as a “Crocker’s Rules” adherent.
“Crocker’s Rules” (if they can even apply to an entire forum) do not apply here. Do not assume someone is following Crocker’s Rules in a discussion unless they have declared it in a parent comment. See Crocker’s Rules.
I generally thought the consensus at LW was that adhering to Crocker’s rules was a beneficial thing.
I think it’s a beneficial thing. That being said, I believe it does state specifically, somewhere in the FAQ, that a poster has to declare Crocker’s Rule over their discussion before it’s okay to state things rudely. And even then, unnecessary, uncalled-for rudeness is not okay.
A lot of it boils down to this: most people, including us on LW however hard we try to improve our rationality, are neither free of emotions nor in perfect control of them. What I mean by that is “rudeness” and things that come across as excessively critical leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Including mine. The discussion may be interesting, and my ideal strategy is to respond anyway in a calm, polite manner (and hope the other person will do likewise.) However, there’s still a primitive, emotional part of my brain that sees sentences unilaterally criticizing something and flinches away. It’s not a good thing. It’s not rational. But it’s human nature, and as of yet we haven’t delved deep enough to change it.
Examples of things my aforesaid primitive emotional brain finds painful to read:
The hipster attitude toward politics might be what I encounter in a brainless beer-filled bar full of drunk idiots.
and
intellectually weak downvoters.
(As an aside, I don’t actually downvote people at all as a general rule, mainly because of the phenomena I’ve observed in myself, where if one of my posts gets downvoted I suddenly start feeling like everyone hates me. Even a little bit of this persecution complex kind of thing is not conducive to me actually wanting to have a reasonable discussion.)
Also, I haven’t read Hayek or any of the other people you mentioned. The area generally referred to as “politics” is not something my brain is structured to find interesting. Still, I would be interesting in hearing why you hold the views you do, i.e. what evidence about the world you have considered in order to settle on those particular views. (This came across rather fragmented in the series of back-and-forth posts.)
I’m sad to say that I don’t think your definition of rationality is very close to my own. I tend to think that death and human suffering is something that should be identified and avoided, for instance.
So does pretty much everyone on LW. We just disagree on methods. Remember that anyone who has a different opinion that you holds that opinion (usually) for what they consider to be a good reason, and can often pull up evidence to why they think it’s a effective belief or opinion. Maybe in some of the cases where you disagree with many LWers, you really do have information that they lack...but lack of knowledge is not the same thing as “intellectual weakness”, and accusing people of ignorance as if it’s a moral failing is not going to make them feel kindly towards the discussion. There are an awful lot of fascinating things to learn about aside from politics, and never enough time to learn everything...the fact that some people have read books about physics instead of Hayek is not a moral failing.
That being said, I believe it does state specifically, somewhere in the FAQ, that a poster has to declare Crocker’s Rule over their discussion before it’s okay to state things rudely. And even then, unnecessary, uncalled-for rudeness is not okay.
Strictly speaking, once someone has declared Crocker’s Rules all rudeness is called for.
Under Crocker’s Rules, rudeness is ignored, and is thus a waste of bandwidth. Therefore, if one posts a comment consisting of nothing but rudeness, one might as well not post at all.
Under Crocker’s Rules, rudeness is ignored, and is thus a waste of bandwidth. Therefore, if one posts a comment consisting of nothing but rudeness, one might as well not post at all.
Where by “consisting of nothing but rudeness” you also mean “consisting of rudeness that itself does not also represent information”?
Sort of, except that I’d amend “information” to “useful information”, because, mathematically speaking, rudeness does represent information (in that it takes up bytes on the network). But when an ideally Crockered (if that’s a word) reader encounters rudeness, he ignores it, thus reducing its informational content to zero.
For example, when one reads something like, “only a total moron like yourself would commit the obvious ad hoc fallacy in line 5 of your argument, and also, you smell”, he interprets it as ”...ad hoc fallacy in line 5...”, and is able to respond accordingly (or update his beliefs, as needed).
I generally thought the consensus at LW was that adhering to Crocker’s rules was a beneficial thing.
No. I don’t respect Crocker’s rules from either side (that is someone declaring Crocker’s rules does not completely remove social consequences for treating them thus).
The bit in the parentheses. Other readers of the message and even the Crocker’s declarer often still take offense if Crocker’s rules are actually followed. Most of the declaration of Crocker’s rules seems to be about the signal of strength that the utterance gives.
In the interests of charity, I usually interpret the declaration as primarily an attempt at precommitting to an endorsed course of action (that is, wanting “honest” feedback) rather than at signalling to others that one practices that course of action (and thus has the various admirable properties that implies), but I’ll admit that the evidence seems to point more strongly to the latter.
I still think you’re something of a jerk for unfavorably comparing me to a spambot for my karma having been downgraded to −14, but hey, to each their own style of interaction.
I didn’t expect that interpretation. I was actually just thinking of the implementation of a spam bot detector!
I believe in giving people a second chance, regardless of their karma. Of course, second/third/Nth chances follow the law of rapidly diminishing returns...
I believe in giving people a second chance, regardless of their karma. Of course, second/third/Nth chances follow the law of rapidly diminishing returns...
Sounds good to me. How about we allow them an Nth chance every 6 minutes? ;)
If someone makes a political comment, they’ll be rapidly downvoted by those who are emotionally (not necessarily rationally) invested in the counterargument.
You are almost certainly mistaken. Explicitly political content isn’t generally downvoted because of investments in opposing positions (I do recall one possible exception, but lack of cluefulness and a bad-faith debating style were at least as much to blame there): it’s downvoted because it’s perceived, and correctly so, as presenting a threat to unbiased discussion.
It’s well within site norms to post content with political implications, at least outside of issues relating to gender and to a lesser extent race (which are uniquely disruptive exceptions as best I can tell). People do: there’s content supporting any number of possible political stances, including some seriously weird ones that don’t as far as I know have actual movements attached to them. But you need a data-driven approach for this to work, and as far as possible you need to refrain from explicit political advocacy in your presentation. Rhetoric will not avail you: at best you’ll get linked to the post you happen to be commenting under. More likely you’ll simply be downvoted into oblivion.
No. You still don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. It has nothing to do with people disagreeing with your political positions.
but something like 54 people at lesswrong identified themselves as “communists.”
No. Five. 5 People at Less Wrong identified themselves as “communists”. 352 people identified as libertarians. Even if all the communists who took the survey were online right now and downvoting all your comments that would still not explain all your downvotes. We have no problem with individualists and comments expressing or recommending libertarian positions are routinely well-upvoted. Moderators and funders have been published by Reason and Cato. People here practice corrective upvoting. If your political allies felt you were getting downvoted unfairly they would have reversed the downvotes. They have not because they are, instead, voting you down.
They are voting you down because your comments indicated that your mind has been killed by politics and when people pointed this out you started insulting everyone. They are downvoting you because you argue like you are trying to win, not convince. You resort to hyperbole and refuse to understand simple concepts like signal-noise ratio. You are certain when you do not have the evidence to be certain. When people disagree with you you only interpret that as evidence of their stupidity, insanity or evilness. You are just like the Democrat or Republican who supports every position his party leadership recommends.
Politics has killed your mind. Or you’re trolling. It had killed my mind once so I understand. At times it threatens to retake it and it occasionally infects my comments here (after which I am rightly downvoted). But perhaps you’re too far gone.
Perhaps I’m committing a fundamental attribution error right now, but you currently seem to me so mindkilled by politics that you seem to think anyone downvoting you must be a dirty communist—as opposed to e.g. people that are turned off by your rudeness, your leaps to conclusions, etc, etc.
So mindkilled, that you didn’t even notice that that self-reported communists in LW are 5, not 54. So mind-killed that you don’t even check your assumptions.
Stalin (a self-identified communist) murdered 50,000,000 innocent people, Mao (another self-identified communist) murdered at leasty 60,000,000, and people still identify themselves with that ideology?
Communists say in turn “Hitler was a NOT-communist, and Attila the Hun was a NOT-communist, and Genghis-Khan was a not-communist, and the slave-owners of American South were not-communists, and the people who launched World War I were not-communists, and people still identify themselves with non-communism?”
Now a more *rational” argument you could have made would have been to statistically correlate increased/decreased misery/oppression under communist regimes over time, and to argue that this shows communism increases misery.
I wouldn’t put too much effort into refuting Jake_Witmer. His rants include a reference to “FEMA camps”. The FEMA camp conspiracy theory is to legitimate concerns about declining civil liberties in the US as “9/11 was an inside job” is to legitimate objections to the “war on terror”. In other words, you’re probably underestimating just how mindkilled he is, and it is unlikely to be worth your time to make a detailed attempt to persuade him to change.
The problem with pretty much all of this comment is that it made me feel very, very disinclined to participate in the discussion, or to read any further. Maybe I’m more sensitive than many LW readers and posters (“building karma” is a very good description of what I did with my first few weeks of commenting) but I can’t be that much more sensitive, and it feels to me like most of this comment was intended as an attack.
Which is kind of disappointing, because there were some genuinely intriguing ideas in some of your other comments. Now that I dig around to find more, I find...this.
So, although I’m a libertarian futurist (gee, thought I was in the right place, LOL), my karma is −14. That, by itself, makes this site something of a joke.
It does minimize them and allow them to be expanded. I do that all the time to see what posts I’m missing. Downvoted for whining and not even bothering to figure out how the system works.
It does minimize them and allow them to be expanded. I do that all the time...
FYI, you can also turn off this behavior entirely if you want to just see all the comments all the time. Under ‘Preferences’, “Don’t show me comments with a score less than”—blank this field.
thank! but I actually prefer actively clicking them, it forces me to pay more attention to karma and what is being ignored on the site. I have top-level discussion posts set to not hide because they don’t do this though.
Yep, already noted my mistake, but decided not to edit it out, since wedifrid had already commented on it, and to edit it out would have made him look like he was commenting on a fabricated mistake, which would be a dickish thing to do.
If you want to retract something without retracting the whole post, you can strikethrough text with the following syntax:
Moreover, this whole posting system is stupid in that it doesn’t allow “comments below threshold” to be seen. Why not minimize them, but allow them to be expanded?
Huh? I thought that was what it did… Has it changed?
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That’s exactly how it works.
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Jake, you may have the potential to become a productive long-term contributor to this site. You definitely have the potential to alienate all your readers and get yourself downvoted into oblivion, since that’s already happening. Why is it happening?
First, you’re political, you have a strong political agenda. That inherently causes you problems regardless of the agenda, because political activists make demands, and everyone is already busy living their lives. People are not strolling through life waiting for someone to grab them by the throat and shout the truth at them. So you definitely need to go much slower here, rather than dumping a reading list on everyone and saying “these authors solved politics”, while simultaneously saying that the truth about these matters is obvious and simple.
Second, your immediate response to getting into difficulty is to start arguing, at considerable length, that the site should function differently, that it should be possible to make posts of unlimited length, that the people who downvoted you are authoritarians and communist idiots, etc. You are exhibiting an instant persecution complex. That is something you must outgrow if you want to be politically effective, and not just a righteous street preacher ignored by passers-by.
I like this sentence.
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Well, see, currently you don’t have any empirical evidence that your nanobot cure won’t kill me swiftly and I suspect it would, so your apparent insistence that I inject myself with it right here on the spot sounds a lot like those black plague merchants to me. I would be in favor of testing the nanobot cure (assuming the nanobots aren’t self replicating), but please don’t start the testing with life humans.
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You don’t get to make a claim and then place the burden on others to step up and shoot holes in it. Unlike people, bold claims start out guilty and remain so until proven innocent.
Instead, start by providing reasonably non-ambiguous ways to measure constructs like “properly-functioning”, “freedom” and “production”, then show research or analyses supporting the correlation you want to claim. (The short form of the foregoing: “citation needed”.)
Drop the second part of the claim which is pure emotional appeal and metaphor (“machinery”, “supreme”, “violent”), but otherwise content-free.
Assuming the correlation exists, also investigate alternative explanations, acknowledging when one of these cannot be ruled immediately out by argument or by observation, so that further tests are needed.
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I don’t want to say too much about the pros and cons of the LW interface, except that entry barriers do help to keep out spammers, crackpots, cultists, and others who would only come to talk, not to listen. It’s proving possible to talk with you, so, we’ll see how that ends up. I’ll let other people who have more insight into the logic of LW’s existing arrangements defend them.
I’m more interested in how your politics will play out here. I see you as a representative of a faction of opinion I’ll call Rational Transhuman Freedom. You mention Hayek and Ron Paul, but you also talk about nanobots and AGIs, and you’re big on rationality. It’s extropian Objectivism.
I have had to ask myself, what is the political sensibility of Less Wrong? I don’t mean the affiliations named in a poll, I mean the political agenda that is implicitly being expressed by people’s attitudes and priorities. In this regard, I find the emphasis on identifying which charities are the most important and effective to be the best clue. People just don’t debate policy, and how the state should act, at all. Instead they debate what the most effectively altruistic use of their spare change would be. I don’t actually know how to characterize this as a political attitude—perhaps it’s pre-political, it’s a sign of a community not yet forced to engage with the state and with political ideologies—but it’s certainly not hipster apathy.
Of course there is also an aversion to political discussion, as a big distraction, as the topic where people are most likely to become stupid, and as just not a productive way to test one’s rationality skills. On the Singularity side, there is also yet another transpolitical attitude present, a sort of monastic-slash-alchemical desire to not become entangled with the fallen world of mundane affairs, in favor of performing the great working whereby a friendly demiurge will be invoked to set it right. The world can be awful but that doesn’t mean you should run off and join the melee, because it has always been like this, and the real change will only come from superintelligence.
However, there truly are people here who are eager to use rationality to make a better world right now, and this is where LW might eventually develop some explicit stances regarding pre-Singularity politics. I consider the recent posts about Leverage Research to be one emerging political current (it had precursors, e.g. in Giles’s series on “Altruist Support”); it’s a maximalist expression of the impulse behind the discussion about optimal charities. Jake, when it comes to people making a political choice, I think this is the real competitor to the faction of Rational Transhuman Freedom,and it will be very interesting to see how that dialogue plays out, if the discussion ever manages to rise to that level.
These are competing utopianisms. Probably they express different aspects of the human utility function. Partisans of the Freedom agenda can be very eloquent when they talk about suffering caused by government, but the flip side of their political methodology is that you’re not allowed to use government to solve problems either, and this is what galls the defenders of more familiar, “statist” ideas of governance. Pursuing the Freedom agenda ends up mostly being about giving individuals a chance to flourish under their own power.
The other utopianism, exemplified by Leverage’s plan for the world, is the one that wants to solve everyone’s problems. Leverage does not presently talk about coercion. Instead, they are psychological utopians, who think that if they’re smart enough, they can figure out how to get everyone to work together and behave decently towards each other. Advocates of Freedom are willing to talk about the wonders of spontaneous order, but politically they leave the details to the market and to civil society; their agenda is to starve the beast, topple Leviathan, pare back the state. As I said, it remains to be seen how this polarity will play out here, but certainly history shows that it can become a deadly rivalry.
Another intellectual challenge that might show up for you here is the critique of libertarianism produced by “Mencius Moldbug”, who is making a serious effort to revive pre-democratic ideas about how society ought to work. Mencius’s argument is that given human nature, there must always be authority, and we are better off when we have a political culture which accepts this, and understands that the good life is to be found by having good rulers. Vladimir_M is a Mencius reader, and there must be others here.
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No you are not. You do not believe that random strangers should be able to enter your house at their convenience so that they may loudly share their opinions with you in your living room. Lesswrong is similarly not obliged to provide a forum for content that provides negative utility to its users.
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Seriously, dude, calm down. I agree with your politics (the majority, albeit a small majority, of LW is libertarian) and I still find you obnoxious. If convincing people that your politics is best is your goal, consider how that goal is best met: Is that answer really writing walls of aggressive text on a site that has a small and overtly apolitical userbase?
This is not a political forum. Politics is generally considered off-topic here, and statements of political views will generally be downvoted immediately regardless of other content, largely for reasons outlined in this post.
“Crocker’s Rules” (if they can even apply to an entire forum) do not apply here. Do not assume someone is following Crocker’s Rules in a discussion unless they have declared it in a parent comment. See Crocker’s Rules.
Of course they can so apply. Simply make it a condition of entry...
I think I was mostly wondering about the grammar. I agree you can do that.
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I think it’s a beneficial thing. That being said, I believe it does state specifically, somewhere in the FAQ, that a poster has to declare Crocker’s Rule over their discussion before it’s okay to state things rudely. And even then, unnecessary, uncalled-for rudeness is not okay.
A lot of it boils down to this: most people, including us on LW however hard we try to improve our rationality, are neither free of emotions nor in perfect control of them. What I mean by that is “rudeness” and things that come across as excessively critical leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Including mine. The discussion may be interesting, and my ideal strategy is to respond anyway in a calm, polite manner (and hope the other person will do likewise.) However, there’s still a primitive, emotional part of my brain that sees sentences unilaterally criticizing something and flinches away. It’s not a good thing. It’s not rational. But it’s human nature, and as of yet we haven’t delved deep enough to change it.
Examples of things my aforesaid primitive emotional brain finds painful to read:
and
(As an aside, I don’t actually downvote people at all as a general rule, mainly because of the phenomena I’ve observed in myself, where if one of my posts gets downvoted I suddenly start feeling like everyone hates me. Even a little bit of this persecution complex kind of thing is not conducive to me actually wanting to have a reasonable discussion.)
Also, I haven’t read Hayek or any of the other people you mentioned. The area generally referred to as “politics” is not something my brain is structured to find interesting. Still, I would be interesting in hearing why you hold the views you do, i.e. what evidence about the world you have considered in order to settle on those particular views. (This came across rather fragmented in the series of back-and-forth posts.)
So does pretty much everyone on LW. We just disagree on methods. Remember that anyone who has a different opinion that you holds that opinion (usually) for what they consider to be a good reason, and can often pull up evidence to why they think it’s a effective belief or opinion. Maybe in some of the cases where you disagree with many LWers, you really do have information that they lack...but lack of knowledge is not the same thing as “intellectual weakness”, and accusing people of ignorance as if it’s a moral failing is not going to make them feel kindly towards the discussion. There are an awful lot of fascinating things to learn about aside from politics, and never enough time to learn everything...the fact that some people have read books about physics instead of Hayek is not a moral failing.
Strictly speaking, once someone has declared Crocker’s Rules all rudeness is called for.
It’s accepted. That doesn’t mean it’s called for.
Under Crocker’s Rules, rudeness is ignored, and is thus a waste of bandwidth. Therefore, if one posts a comment consisting of nothing but rudeness, one might as well not post at all.
Where by “consisting of nothing but rudeness” you also mean “consisting of rudeness that itself does not also represent information”?
Sort of, except that I’d amend “information” to “useful information”, because, mathematically speaking, rudeness does represent information (in that it takes up bytes on the network). But when an ideally Crockered (if that’s a word) reader encounters rudeness, he ignores it, thus reducing its informational content to zero.
For example, when one reads something like, “only a total moron like yourself would commit the obvious ad hoc fallacy in line 5 of your argument, and also, you smell”, he interprets it as ”...ad hoc fallacy in line 5...”, and is able to respond accordingly (or update his beliefs, as needed).
No. I don’t respect Crocker’s rules from either side (that is someone declaring Crocker’s rules does not completely remove social consequences for treating them thus).
http://xkcd.com/592/
Reasons?
The bit in the parentheses. Other readers of the message and even the Crocker’s declarer often still take offense if Crocker’s rules are actually followed. Most of the declaration of Crocker’s rules seems to be about the signal of strength that the utterance gives.
In the interests of charity, I usually interpret the declaration as primarily an attempt at precommitting to an endorsed course of action (that is, wanting “honest” feedback) rather than at signalling to others that one practices that course of action (and thus has the various admirable properties that implies), but I’ll admit that the evidence seems to point more strongly to the latter.
I didn’t expect that interpretation. I was actually just thinking of the implementation of a spam bot detector!
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My guess is that the time limit is a defence mechanism against spambots. You are not a spambot, but the system doesn’t know that.
Because he is at −14! (So may as well be.)
EDIT: From the perspective of the lesswrong source code!
I believe in giving people a second chance, regardless of their karma. Of course, second/third/Nth chances follow the law of rapidly diminishing returns...
Sounds good to me. How about we allow them an Nth chance every 6 minutes? ;)
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If you were appreciated then you wouldn’t have negative karma and so could post as often as you wish!
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You are almost certainly mistaken. Explicitly political content isn’t generally downvoted because of investments in opposing positions (I do recall one possible exception, but lack of cluefulness and a bad-faith debating style were at least as much to blame there): it’s downvoted because it’s perceived, and correctly so, as presenting a threat to unbiased discussion.
It’s well within site norms to post content with political implications, at least outside of issues relating to gender and to a lesser extent race (which are uniquely disruptive exceptions as best I can tell). People do: there’s content supporting any number of possible political stances, including some seriously weird ones that don’t as far as I know have actual movements attached to them. But you need a data-driven approach for this to work, and as far as possible you need to refrain from explicit political advocacy in your presentation. Rhetoric will not avail you: at best you’ll get linked to the post you happen to be commenting under. More likely you’ll simply be downvoted into oblivion.
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No. You still don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. It has nothing to do with people disagreeing with your political positions.
No. Five. 5 People at Less Wrong identified themselves as “communists”. 352 people identified as libertarians. Even if all the communists who took the survey were online right now and downvoting all your comments that would still not explain all your downvotes. We have no problem with individualists and comments expressing or recommending libertarian positions are routinely well-upvoted. Moderators and funders have been published by Reason and Cato. People here practice corrective upvoting. If your political allies felt you were getting downvoted unfairly they would have reversed the downvotes. They have not because they are, instead, voting you down.
They are voting you down because your comments indicated that your mind has been killed by politics and when people pointed this out you started insulting everyone. They are downvoting you because you argue like you are trying to win, not convince. You resort to hyperbole and refuse to understand simple concepts like signal-noise ratio. You are certain when you do not have the evidence to be certain. When people disagree with you you only interpret that as evidence of their stupidity, insanity or evilness. You are just like the Democrat or Republican who supports every position his party leadership recommends.
Politics has killed your mind. Or you’re trolling. It had killed my mind once so I understand. At times it threatens to retake it and it occasionally infects my comments here (after which I am rightly downvoted). But perhaps you’re too far gone.
Perhaps I’m committing a fundamental attribution error right now, but you currently seem to me so mindkilled by politics that you seem to think anyone downvoting you must be a dirty communist—as opposed to e.g. people that are turned off by your rudeness, your leaps to conclusions, etc, etc.
So mindkilled, that you didn’t even notice that that self-reported communists in LW are 5, not 54. So mind-killed that you don’t even check your assumptions.
Communists say in turn “Hitler was a NOT-communist, and Attila the Hun was a NOT-communist, and Genghis-Khan was a not-communist, and the slave-owners of American South were not-communists, and the people who launched World War I were not-communists, and people still identify themselves with non-communism?”
Now a more *rational” argument you could have made would have been to statistically correlate increased/decreased misery/oppression under communist regimes over time, and to argue that this shows communism increases misery.
I wouldn’t put too much effort into refuting Jake_Witmer. His rants include a reference to “FEMA camps”. The FEMA camp conspiracy theory is to legitimate concerns about declining civil liberties in the US as “9/11 was an inside job” is to legitimate objections to the “war on terror”. In other words, you’re probably underestimating just how mindkilled he is, and it is unlikely to be worth your time to make a detailed attempt to persuade him to change.
One for the “Shit Rationalists say” thread ;).
The problem with pretty much all of this comment is that it made me feel very, very disinclined to participate in the discussion, or to read any further. Maybe I’m more sensitive than many LW readers and posters (“building karma” is a very good description of what I did with my first few weeks of commenting) but I can’t be that much more sensitive, and it feels to me like most of this comment was intended as an attack.
Which is kind of disappointing, because there were some genuinely intriguing ideas in some of your other comments. Now that I dig around to find more, I find...this.
The opposite is true.
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It does minimize them and allow them to be expanded. I do that all the time to see what posts I’m missing. Downvoted for whining and not even bothering to figure out how the system works.
FYI, you can also turn off this behavior entirely if you want to just see all the comments all the time. Under ‘Preferences’, “Don’t show me comments with a score less than”—blank this field.
thank! but I actually prefer actively clicking them, it forces me to pay more attention to karma and what is being ignored on the site. I have top-level discussion posts set to not hide because they don’t do this though.
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If you want to retract something without retracting the whole post, you can strikethrough text with the following syntax:
<strike>text goes here</strike>
(generating
text goes here)Huh? I thought that was what it did… Has it changed?
That is what it does; original poster is wrong, as they admit elsewhere in this doomed thread.
I wish!