Your concern is fine but your suggested solutions amount to shooting off your arm to cure a bee-sting. The community seems to me nowhere near as polarized as you suggest.
If by “respond to the downvoting in kind” you mean something like “start downvoting articles from the Evil Feminists even when there’s nothing in the articles themselves that would have made us downvote them if they’d been written by other people”, then it’s that that would be the first step to a “karma cartel” situation. (And “in kind” would be just plain dishonest.)
If by “respond to the downvoting in kind” you mean something like “start downvoting articles that we think have negative net contribution to the Less Wrong community because they encourage harmful attitudes”, then you should be doing that and there’s nothing cartel-like about it.
Furthermore, as a participant in some of these discussions, I have made a point of generally not downvoting comments I disagree with, nevermind other comments by the same people.
On the other hand, I’ve actually had roughly 80 unrelated comments of mine downvoted, and for various reasons suspect it was probably by someone who disagreed with me on precisely this topic of gender-related attitudes.
It’s also worth noting that we’ve been explicitly encouraged to downvote comments we think contribute negatively to LW, and much of what Alicorn complained about falls firmly in my category of “thoughtlessly rude behavior that lowers the quality of the discussion”.
is a dangerously broad category. For example, one might start downvoting all comments from gender X because we think we need less of that gender because they “contribute negatively”. Or we might start systematically downvoting a particular person even when they make an entirely valid point, because they are “part of a problem” and need to be chased away. No, downvoting should solely be a measure of the degree of accuracy and relevance of a comment to settling the empirical question at hand.
As we become politicized, we will find ways of justifying political actions against people on the “other side”, and having a really broad category like “contribute negatively” will just make it really easy for us to do that. Our brains do all this automatically.
No, downvoting should solely be a measure of the degree of accuracy and relevance of a comment to settling the empirical question at hand.
I don’t think most people think that’s what downvotes are for. But that’s been discussed at great length.
Specifically, I’m under the impression downvote means ‘I want to see fewer comments like this’ at its basis, and any other analysis of what it means proceeds from that and our community standards.
At some point we really do have to enforce community norms to prevent the level of discourse from deteriorating. Antisocial and obnoxious behavior are perfectly valid reasons to downvote a comment, I have a hard time believing you really think they aren’t, and I’m reasonably confident that most of LW is okay with the idea, judging by other comments I’ve seen receive downvotes (not to pick on him, but Annoyance has gotten some of this) for no obvious reason other than tone.
The issues are where to draw the lines, and how to handle it when the community is sharply divded on what constitutes “polite, respectful discussion”. Frankly, the main person I see drawing “us vs. them” lines here is you.
Antisocial and obnoxious behavior are perfectly valid reasons to downvote a comment, I have a hard time believing you really think they aren’t,
Well I think that if the comment is specifically aimed at being obnoxious, e.g.
“you are a loser and a piece of sh*t”
Then that should be killed.
and how to handle it when the community is sharply divded on what constitutes “polite, respectful discussion”.
But if a comment expresses a true proposition about the world, and the main purpose of the comment is to express that comment, e.g. “blacks are dumber than whites, look at all this data I have, and this list of biases about western culture which shows that we are massively prone to ignore the data” (disclaimer: I do not advocate that position), but as a side effect happens to offend someone, then it should not get deleted.
At least this seems to be to me the algorithm which will empirically lead to truest community beliefs.
Most of the juiciest truths will offend someone, and if we allow the truth to be suppressed because it “causes offence”, we will end up with false beliefs.
“start downvoting articles from the Evil Feminists even when there’s nothing in the articles themselves that would have made us downvote them if they’d been written by other people”
It is the nature of the human mind that we will do this whether we are trying to or not. I no longer trust myself to give an unbiased estimate of an article by alicorn, and I suspect that the reverse is also true.
If by “respond to the downvoting in kind” you mean something like “start downvoting articles that we think have negative net contribution to the Less Wrong community because they encourage harmful attitudes”, then you should be doing that and there’s nothing cartel-like about it.
Agreed. You should already be doing that. I routinely downvote comments that I think are harmful to Less Wrong. Isn’t that basically what voting is for?
Well, total karma becomes rather meaningless after a certain level; it mostly just means you’ve posted a lot. Ratings of individual comments and posts are interesting, though.
Your concern is fine but your suggested solutions amount to shooting off your arm to cure a bee-sting. The community seems to me nowhere near as polarized as you suggest.
That’s why I said “nip in the bud. ”
It isn’t that bad yet, but when we have people saying:
we are actually 1 step away from karma cartels. All it would take is me or PJeby to respond to the downvoting in kind.
I think this is twaddle.
If by “respond to the downvoting in kind” you mean something like “start downvoting articles from the Evil Feminists even when there’s nothing in the articles themselves that would have made us downvote them if they’d been written by other people”, then it’s that that would be the first step to a “karma cartel” situation. (And “in kind” would be just plain dishonest.)
If by “respond to the downvoting in kind” you mean something like “start downvoting articles that we think have negative net contribution to the Less Wrong community because they encourage harmful attitudes”, then you should be doing that and there’s nothing cartel-like about it.
Furthermore, as a participant in some of these discussions, I have made a point of generally not downvoting comments I disagree with, nevermind other comments by the same people.
On the other hand, I’ve actually had roughly 80 unrelated comments of mine downvoted, and for various reasons suspect it was probably by someone who disagreed with me on precisely this topic of gender-related attitudes.
It’s also worth noting that we’ve been explicitly encouraged to downvote comments we think contribute negatively to LW, and much of what Alicorn complained about falls firmly in my category of “thoughtlessly rude behavior that lowers the quality of the discussion”.
is a dangerously broad category. For example, one might start downvoting all comments from gender X because we think we need less of that gender because they “contribute negatively”. Or we might start systematically downvoting a particular person even when they make an entirely valid point, because they are “part of a problem” and need to be chased away. No, downvoting should solely be a measure of the degree of accuracy and relevance of a comment to settling the empirical question at hand.
As we become politicized, we will find ways of justifying political actions against people on the “other side”, and having a really broad category like “contribute negatively” will just make it really easy for us to do that. Our brains do all this automatically.
I don’t think most people think that’s what downvotes are for. But that’s been discussed at great length.
Specifically, I’m under the impression downvote means ‘I want to see fewer comments like this’ at its basis, and any other analysis of what it means proceeds from that and our community standards.
ETA: FWIW, Eliezer has agreed
At some point we really do have to enforce community norms to prevent the level of discourse from deteriorating. Antisocial and obnoxious behavior are perfectly valid reasons to downvote a comment, I have a hard time believing you really think they aren’t, and I’m reasonably confident that most of LW is okay with the idea, judging by other comments I’ve seen receive downvotes (not to pick on him, but Annoyance has gotten some of this) for no obvious reason other than tone.
The issues are where to draw the lines, and how to handle it when the community is sharply divded on what constitutes “polite, respectful discussion”. Frankly, the main person I see drawing “us vs. them” lines here is you.
Well I think that if the comment is specifically aimed at being obnoxious, e.g.
Then that should be killed.
But if a comment expresses a true proposition about the world, and the main purpose of the comment is to express that comment, e.g. “blacks are dumber than whites, look at all this data I have, and this list of biases about western culture which shows that we are massively prone to ignore the data” (disclaimer: I do not advocate that position), but as a side effect happens to offend someone, then it should not get deleted.
At least this seems to be to me the algorithm which will empirically lead to truest community beliefs.
Most of the juiciest truths will offend someone, and if we allow the truth to be suppressed because it “causes offence”, we will end up with false beliefs.
This seems utterly obvious to me.
It is the nature of the human mind that we will do this whether we are trying to or not. I no longer trust myself to give an unbiased estimate of an article by alicorn, and I suspect that the reverse is also true.
As clunky as it is, this is a major virtue of the LessWrong anti-kibitzer script.
Yup, you could just install that if you’re that worried.
Agreed. You should already be doing that. I routinely downvote comments that I think are harmful to Less Wrong. Isn’t that basically what voting is for?
Who gives a crap about individual karma, anyway?
Well alicorn clearly does:
and I think that she is correct that karma influences people to a significant degree.
Well, total karma becomes rather meaningless after a certain level; it mostly just means you’ve posted a lot. Ratings of individual comments and posts are interesting, though.