Frankly, I think that you’re mistaking noise for signal here. There’s no “niceness” or “rudeness” going on in these comments, there are just various straightforwardly appropriate responses to various statements / claims / comments / etc.
But that’s just the thing: you shouldn’t be thinking of object-level discussions on LW as “social situations” which you need to “navigate”. If that’s how you’re approaching things, then of course you’re going to have all of these reactions—and you’ve doomed the whole enterprise right from the start! You’re operating on too high a simulacrum level. No useful intellectual work will get done that way.
There’s just no need for this sort of “higher simulacrum level” stuff. Is my comment “nice”? Is it “rude”? No, it’s just saying what I think is true and relevant. If you stop trying to detect “niceness” and “rudeness” in my comments, it’ll be simpler for everyone involved. That’s the benefit of abjuring “vibes”: we can get down to the important stuff.
… on the other hand, maybe everything I just said in the above paragraph is totally wrong, and you should instead try much harder to detect “vibes”:
I just genuinely don’t get why the particular comment asking me to define vibes should get downvoted
Do you mean this literally? Because that’s intensely ironic, if so! You see, it’s extremely obvious to me why that comment got downvoted. If I get it, and you don’t, then… what does that say about our respective ability to understand “vibes”, to “navigate social situations”, and generally to understand what’s going on in discussions like this? (No, really—what does it say about those things? That’s not a rhetorical question, and I absolutely cannot predict what your response is going to be.)
Do you mean this literally? Because that’s intensely ironic, if so! You see, it’s extremely obvious to me why that comment got downvoted.
I didn’t say I don’t get why it happened; I said, I don’t get why it should happen, meaning I don’t see a reason I agree with, I think the comment is fine. (And if it matters, I never thought about what I think would have happened or why with this comment, so I neither made a true nor a false prediction.)
Frankly, I think that you’re mistaking noise for signal here. There’s no “niceness” or “rudeness” going on in these comments, there are just various straightforwardly appropriate responses to various statements / claims / comments / etc.
This is related to what I meant when I wrote:
There’s just no need for this sort of “higher simulacrum level” stuff. Is my comment “nice”? Is it “rude”? No, it’s just saying what I think is true and relevant. If you stop trying to detect “niceness” and “rudeness” in my comments, it’ll be simpler for everyone involved. That’s the benefit of abjuring “vibes”: we can get down to the important stuff.
… on the other hand, maybe everything I just said in the above paragraph is totally wrong, and you should instead try much harder to detect “vibes”:
Do you mean this literally? Because that’s intensely ironic, if so! You see, it’s extremely obvious to me why that comment got downvoted. If I get it, and you don’t, then… what does that say about our respective ability to understand “vibes”, to “navigate social situations”, and generally to understand what’s going on in discussions like this? (No, really—what does it say about those things? That’s not a rhetorical question, and I absolutely cannot predict what your response is going to be.)
I didn’t say I don’t get why it happened; I said, I don’t get why it should happen, meaning I don’t see a reason I agree with, I think the comment is fine. (And if it matters, I never thought about what I think would have happened or why with this comment, so I neither made a true nor a false prediction.)
I see… well, fair enough, I guess. (I find the original wording confusing, FYI, but your explanation does clear things up.)