Seems to me, when you find a vitriolic comment, there are essentially three options (other than ignoring it):
upvote it;
downvote it;
write a polite steelmanned version as a separate top-level comment, and downvote the original one.
The problem is, the third option is too much work. And the second options feels like: “omg, we can’t take any criticism; we have become a cult just like some people have always accused us!”. So people choose the first option.
Maybe a good approach would be if the moderators would write a message like: “I am going to delete this nasty comment in 3 hours; if anyone believes it contains valuable information, please report it as a separate top-level comment.”
There seems to be a subset of people tangentially related to LW that really likes criticizing LW
Some of them also like to play the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” game (e.g. the Basilisk). Delete or not delete, you are a bad guy either way; you only have a choice of what kind of a bad guy you are—the horrible one who keeps nasty comments on his website, or the horrible one who censors information exposing the dark secrets of the website.
My current exposure to several blogs / messaging boards seems to be it’s fashionable/wise/something in some sense to be that LW types childish/autistic/stupid (?) I’m curious why this is the case.
Trolling or status games, I guess. For people who don’t have rationality as a value, it is fun (and more pageviews for their website) to poke the nerds and watch how they react. For people who have rationality as a value, it is a status move to declare that they are more rational than the stupid folks at LW.
At some moment, trying to interpret everything charitably and trying to answer politely and reasonably will make you a laughingstock. The most important lacking social skill is probably recognizing when you are simply being bullied. It is good to start with assumption of good intent, but it is stupid to refuse to update in face of overwhelming evidence.
For example, it is obvious that people on RationalWiki are absolutely not interested in evaluating the degree of rationality on LW objectively; they enjoy too much their “snarky point of view”, which simply means bullying the outgroup; and they have already decided that we are an outgroup. Now that we stopped giving a fuck about them, and more or less called them stupid in return, they moved to editing the Wikipedia article about LW as their next step. Whatever. As they say, never wrestle with a pig, because you get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. Any energy spent on debating them would be better spent e.g. writing new valuable content for LW.
True, but I guess some people were doing this even before the downvotes were disables. Or sometimes we had a wave of downvotes first, then someone saying “hey, this contains some valid criticism, so I am going to upvote it, because we shouldn’t just hide the criticism”, then a wave of contrarian upvotes, then a meta-debate… eh.
Seems to me, when you find a vitriolic comment, there are essentially three options (other than ignoring it):
upvote it;
downvote it;
write a polite steelmanned version as a separate top-level comment, and downvote the original one.
The problem is, the third option is too much work. And the second options feels like: “omg, we can’t take any criticism; we have become a cult just like some people have always accused us!”. So people choose the first option.
Maybe a good approach would be if the moderators would write a message like: “I am going to delete this nasty comment in 3 hours; if anyone believes it contains valuable information, please report it as a separate top-level comment.”
Some of them also like to play the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” game (e.g. the Basilisk). Delete or not delete, you are a bad guy either way; you only have a choice of what kind of a bad guy you are—the horrible one who keeps nasty comments on his website, or the horrible one who censors information exposing the dark secrets of the website.
Trolling or status games, I guess. For people who don’t have rationality as a value, it is fun (and more pageviews for their website) to poke the nerds and watch how they react. For people who have rationality as a value, it is a status move to declare that they are more rational than the stupid folks at LW.
At some moment, trying to interpret everything charitably and trying to answer politely and reasonably will make you a laughingstock. The most important lacking social skill is probably recognizing when you are simply being bullied. It is good to start with assumption of good intent, but it is stupid to refuse to update in face of overwhelming evidence.
For example, it is obvious that people on RationalWiki are absolutely not interested in evaluating the degree of rationality on LW objectively; they enjoy too much their “snarky point of view”, which simply means bullying the outgroup; and they have already decided that we are an outgroup. Now that we stopped giving a fuck about them, and more or less called them stupid in return, they moved to editing the Wikipedia article about LW as their next step. Whatever. As they say, never wrestle with a pig, because you get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. Any energy spent on debating them would be better spent e.g. writing new valuable content for LW.
You mean “the second option is disabled”. which would leave upvote or ignore.
True, but I guess some people were doing this even before the downvotes were disables. Or sometimes we had a wave of downvotes first, then someone saying “hey, this contains some valid criticism, so I am going to upvote it, because we shouldn’t just hide the criticism”, then a wave of contrarian upvotes, then a meta-debate… eh.