If you’re being a troll: save yourself some trouble and go away. Eliezer’s been irritable lately and is apt to boot you.
If I were a troll, would going away somehow be more beneficial to me than being booted? I mean, does this Eliezer actually physically kick suspected trolls? Or would the end result be the exact same? And if I were a troll, do you suppose saving myself some trouble would be my overriding concern?
If you’re actually, sincerely trying to have a fun exchange about whether you might be immortal (quantum or otherwise):
1) The little numbers on your comments are, in fact, important and should interest you. They indicate how you’re being received, on average.
Why should I care how I’m being received by anonymous faceless strangers, whose posts I may never even have read, and who may not even be taking part in the discussion? Are there Wrongie awards up for grabs? I believe the girl mentioned something about a… check? Please don’t tell me that I should alter my thinking and the expression of my ideas to suit popular opinion! Is that what you do?
You may have corrupted public opinion of this account to the point where you can’t salvage it...
So, public opinion is going to hold something I wrote on this thread against me forever, and use it against me on other threads, whether it agrees with me on those other threads or not? Have I stumbled into the Old Fishwives’ forum by mistake?
If this is the venue you’ve chosen to have your discussion on, surely you think we make suitable interlocutors—and hopefully, that will let you find informational value in numeric disapproval too.
I began posting here about a minute after I arrived for the first time. I’m just beginning to learn about the mindsets of some of the participants here. I’m not overly impressed so far. I’m prepared though, to give it a chance. No point in going by first impressions. I’ll need a few more listenings before I decide if I like it or not.
When people quibble with you over what words mean, that requires your attention too! They’re trying to find a way to communicate with you.
I received a response that said (in its entirety) “Taboo legitimate”. The word ‘Taboo’ was a link to an article about something or other that appeared irrelevant. Do you suppose that poster was trying to find a way to communicate? When I questioned him, he apologized for his brevity and expanded on his post, and I withdrew the word ’legitimate”, as it was redundant anyway. Others chimed in (as you do here) telling me how I was the one at fault.
Pretty much nobody here will find themselves strangely compelled by protestations that a) your opponents have poor reading comprehension
Yet, Jack, for one, appears to have poor reading comprehension.
b) it is unfair to expect you to do any background reading even when links are supplied
I don’t protest that it’s unfair. I state that I’m not prepared to do it. If you don’t like it, either stop providing such reading material in lieu of originally-phrased arguments, or don’t engage me. Nobody is forcing you to respond to me.
c) you are winning
I didn’t make this a competition, however, I am winning the debate. It’s immaterial that people don’t find themselves compelled by my stating such (in face of the many votes that state otherwise, and yet fly in the face of the rather obvious missing evidence of my mortality). Is humility big here?
d) we are engaged in groupthink
So, you’re saying that the group, as a body, denies it is engaged in Groupthink? Is there any room for discussion on that?
e) you are an unheard-of non-quantumly immortal creature (although I’d be pretty impressed by certain sorts of video evidence!).
I didn’t say that. I said I could be that. Part of your job is to present me with evidence that I’m not. America was unheard-of… until it was heard-of. And it was right there. The people just couldn’t hear of it, at the beginning.
Right, enough fun. Let’s stick to the topic at hand from now on.
Looks like people are getting fatigued with downvoting you, so I’ll be deleting all your comments from now on.
I can’t say I’m happy that you got so many replies, either; but I suppose if the community were sufficiently annoyed with the repliers, they could downvote the replies.
Psychology note: I’d rather people had stopped replying too, but looking at any particular reply, I’m more likely to upvote it out of positive affect (“take that!”) than remember to think about incentives, and if I did remember, I’d still have a hard time downvoting a true, (locally) on-topic comment. Probably others are doing the same. Time to be more self-aware.
I found the question “What is wrong with this person?” quite interesting and some of the responses were insightful in this regard. We don’t get to encounter extreme irrationality very often and I think the experience of failing to communicate is a good one to have occasionally. Being reminded what bad epistemic hygiene looks like is a great reminder to keep washing up. I also think one or two of the replies include good material to put on a Less Wrong intro/about/faq page if we ever get around to doing it.
The problem is that once you start arguing with someone giving up without resolution is like ending sex before orgasm. So it went on much longer than it should have.
Not that I know of. If one were going to implement a behavior like that, people would get downvotes back when a post went to −3 or under and became invisible by default. But coding resources are scarce.
While I applaud drumming out a troll, I don’t mind that he wasn’t ignored (at least for a while).
Meeting a crazy person/anoying person/young earth creationist/troll gives you the chance to practice Bayesian Judo. There have been times when I wish I’d dedicated more practice to countering ridiculous but verbose interlopers.
Edit: Looks like Jack said this earlier and better.
All of this commenter’s comments are contained in a single thread, of which adefinitemaybe is the parent. It will already be down-voted to the bottom of the Open Thread, so when these comments are no longer ‘Recent’, if someone is reading this far, it is because they find this thread interesting—or even hilarious, like I do.
I find the thread hilarious not only because the dialogue is clever, but also because I’m enjoying the feeling that adefinitemaybe is the mad, crazy, irreverent jester in the court who provides us the opportunity to laugh at ourselves.
I mean, this is great stuff:
Really though, do you guys ever just say die, from the get go, and move on to the next, actually debatable, thing? It’s like a threw ball or som.… {Woof!} As I was saying, it’s like I threw a B-A-L-L or something.
It’s a problem if someone is belligerent all the time, and it’s really annoying if they post in more than one thread. (The last troll was really quite a troll because he would drop inane comments all over the place – down-voting those comments would do nothing to hide them because they were nested in otherwise good threads.)
Given that I happen to enjoy this character (without approving of the behavior) – thinking, say, of Han Solo or even Churchill—I would like to suggest the following umbrella solution for all troublesome behavior; trolls and belligerent personalities alike:
A person can’t comment unless their karma is above −10, and this should be announced in some apparent place. That way people with belligerence and intelligence can game their comments so that they don’t go below the threshold. Keep in mind that this really would force them to be a positive influence; because the community could always down-vote all their comments to kick them out.
If I were a troll, would going away somehow be more beneficial to me than being booted? I mean, does this Eliezer actually physically kick suspected trolls? Or would the end result be the exact same? And if I were a troll, do you suppose saving myself some trouble would be my overriding concern?
Why should I care how I’m being received by anonymous faceless strangers, whose posts I may never even have read, and who may not even be taking part in the discussion? Are there Wrongie awards up for grabs? I believe the girl mentioned something about a… check? Please don’t tell me that I should alter my thinking and the expression of my ideas to suit popular opinion! Is that what you do?
So, public opinion is going to hold something I wrote on this thread against me forever, and use it against me on other threads, whether it agrees with me on those other threads or not? Have I stumbled into the Old Fishwives’ forum by mistake?
I began posting here about a minute after I arrived for the first time. I’m just beginning to learn about the mindsets of some of the participants here. I’m not overly impressed so far. I’m prepared though, to give it a chance. No point in going by first impressions. I’ll need a few more listenings before I decide if I like it or not.
I received a response that said (in its entirety) “Taboo legitimate”. The word ‘Taboo’ was a link to an article about something or other that appeared irrelevant. Do you suppose that poster was trying to find a way to communicate? When I questioned him, he apologized for his brevity and expanded on his post, and I withdrew the word ’legitimate”, as it was redundant anyway. Others chimed in (as you do here) telling me how I was the one at fault.
Yet, Jack, for one, appears to have poor reading comprehension.
I don’t protest that it’s unfair. I state that I’m not prepared to do it. If you don’t like it, either stop providing such reading material in lieu of originally-phrased arguments, or don’t engage me. Nobody is forcing you to respond to me.
I didn’t make this a competition, however, I am winning the debate. It’s immaterial that people don’t find themselves compelled by my stating such (in face of the many votes that state otherwise, and yet fly in the face of the rather obvious missing evidence of my mortality). Is humility big here?
So, you’re saying that the group, as a body, denies it is engaged in Groupthink? Is there any room for discussion on that?
I didn’t say that. I said I could be that. Part of your job is to present me with evidence that I’m not. America was unheard-of… until it was heard-of. And it was right there. The people just couldn’t hear of it, at the beginning.
Right, enough fun. Let’s stick to the topic at hand from now on.
Looks like people are getting fatigued with downvoting you, so I’ll be deleting all your comments from now on.
I can’t say I’m happy that you got so many replies, either; but I suppose if the community were sufficiently annoyed with the repliers, they could downvote the replies.
Psychology note: I’d rather people had stopped replying too, but looking at any particular reply, I’m more likely to upvote it out of positive affect (“take that!”) than remember to think about incentives, and if I did remember, I’d still have a hard time downvoting a true, (locally) on-topic comment. Probably others are doing the same. Time to be more self-aware.
I found the question “What is wrong with this person?” quite interesting and some of the responses were insightful in this regard. We don’t get to encounter extreme irrationality very often and I think the experience of failing to communicate is a good one to have occasionally. Being reminded what bad epistemic hygiene looks like is a great reminder to keep washing up. I also think one or two of the replies include good material to put on a Less Wrong intro/about/faq page if we ever get around to doing it.
The problem is that once you start arguing with someone giving up without resolution is like ending sex before orgasm. So it went on much longer than it should have.
Do people get their downvotes back when a downvoted comment is deleted?
As of about 9 months ago, no.
Not that I know of. If one were going to implement a behavior like that, people would get downvotes back when a post went to −3 or under and became invisible by default. But coding resources are scarce.
While I applaud drumming out a troll, I don’t mind that he wasn’t ignored (at least for a while).
Meeting a crazy person/anoying person/young earth creationist/troll gives you the chance to practice Bayesian Judo. There have been times when I wish I’d dedicated more practice to countering ridiculous but verbose interlopers.
Edit: Looks like Jack said this earlier and better.
But it’s not Bayesian Judo: you can’t argue with a rock, a person whose intent is to ignore what you say.
Fair point. Perhaps it’s arguing with the keeper of the box?
I upvoted this (it was at −1) because despite the fact that I was one of the ones replying, I’m not interested in hearing any more of it either.
I will admit that I feel differently.
All of this commenter’s comments are contained in a single thread, of which adefinitemaybe is the parent. It will already be down-voted to the bottom of the Open Thread, so when these comments are no longer ‘Recent’, if someone is reading this far, it is because they find this thread interesting—or even hilarious, like I do.
I find the thread hilarious not only because the dialogue is clever, but also because I’m enjoying the feeling that adefinitemaybe is the mad, crazy, irreverent jester in the court who provides us the opportunity to laugh at ourselves.
I mean, this is great stuff:
It’s a problem if someone is belligerent all the time, and it’s really annoying if they post in more than one thread. (The last troll was really quite a troll because he would drop inane comments all over the place – down-voting those comments would do nothing to hide them because they were nested in otherwise good threads.)
Given that I happen to enjoy this character (without approving of the behavior) – thinking, say, of Han Solo or even Churchill—I would like to suggest the following umbrella solution for all troublesome behavior; trolls and belligerent personalities alike:
A person can’t comment unless their karma is above −10, and this should be announced in some apparent place. That way people with belligerence and intelligence can game their comments so that they don’t go below the threshold. Keep in mind that this really would force them to be a positive influence; because the community could always down-vote all their comments to kick them out.