do you believe that the up-down voting and down voting serves the purpose of filtering well written, interesting ideas?
No, not especially. I think it serves the purpose of allowing filtering posts and comments that other LessWrong users consider valuable. Sometimes they consider stuff valuable because it’s well-written and interesting, yes. Sometimes because it’s funny. Sometimes because they agree with it. Sometimes because it’s engagingly contrarian. Sometimes for other reasons.
I feel a large portion of voting is based on rhetoric.
I would certainly agree with this. I’m not sure what you intend to capture by the contrast between “well-written” and “rhetoric,” though.
If a person uses any terminology that exists outside of the LW community, [..] they are down-voted.
That’s not just false, it’s downright bizarre. I would agree, though, that sometimes terminology is introduced to discussions in ways that people find valueless, and they vote accordingly.
If a person [..] uses a LW terminology in a different context, they are down-voted.
This is sometimes true, and sometimes false, depending (again) on whether the use is considered valuable or valueless.
Is this a valid reason to down vote someone?
Downvoting a comment/post because it does those things in a valueless way (and has no compensating value) is perfectly valid. Downvoting a comment/post because it does those things in a valuable way is not valid.
From what you and other LW members have said, I infer that the reason for down voting in these cases is to create a stable foundation of terminology to limit misunderstanding by limiting the number of accepted definitions of a term. Is that correct?
No, not especially. I would agree that that’s a fine thing, but I’d be really astonished if that were the reason for downvoting in any significant number of cases.
No, not especially. I think it serves the purpose of allowing filtering posts and comments that other LessWrong users consider valuable. Sometimes they consider stuff valuable because it’s well-written and interesting, yes. Sometimes because it’s funny. Sometimes because they agree with it. Sometimes because it’s engagingly contrarian. Sometimes for other reasons.
I would certainly agree with this. I’m not sure what you intend to capture by the contrast between “well-written” and “rhetoric,” though.
That’s not just false, it’s downright bizarre.
I would agree, though, that sometimes terminology is introduced to discussions in ways that people find valueless, and they vote accordingly.
This is sometimes true, and sometimes false, depending (again) on whether the use is considered valuable or valueless.
Downvoting a comment/post because it does those things in a valueless way (and has no compensating value) is perfectly valid. Downvoting a comment/post because it does those things in a valuable way is not valid.
No, not especially. I would agree that that’s a fine thing, but I’d be really astonished if that were the reason for downvoting in any significant number of cases.