I’ve been noticing a lot of my comments get rapidly downvoted once shortly after I post them lately, especially (but not exclusively) in threads where I post libertarian-progressive-ish rebuttals to social-conservative positions.
I’d like to think that it’s just someone who doesn’t approve of political discussion on LW — but the socially conservative interlocutors don’t seem to be getting the same treatment. (With the exception of the ever-popular sam0345, whose low comment scores I expect have more to do with his hostile attitude than the fact that he posts about politics.)
So there does seem to be some Blue/Green unpleasantness going on here. Comments advocating “race realism”, sexual shame, or other socially conservative positions tend to float around +3 or +4, while responses disagreeing with them — even with citations to academic work and evidence on the subject — tend to float around −1 to +1.
It doesn’t bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I’d be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they’re not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I’m just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is “contrarian” really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it’s worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it’s the latter, well, I suppose all I can do is mention that I don’t downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.
(I don’t mind if this comment gets downvoted, by the way. I feel uncomfortable with discussions of the voting system, as they can become a meta rathole.)
EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU’RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.
I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside. My experiences have been similar, with many of my posts getting instantly down voted to −3 to −4, then slowly recovering karma later. As you probably recall from our recent conversations with me we have differing opinions on some politically charged subjects.
It doesn’t bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I’d be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they’re not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I’m just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is “contrarian” really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it’s worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it’s the latter, well,
I don’t think you a bad poster and you seem to have a high karma score so we can mostly throw out ⓪. I recall often up voting posts by you, even the ones I disagree with and only recall downvoting a recent one where you seemed to be plain wrong in the context of the discussed article. In that case I also made a comment explaining why I thought it wrong. The contrarian explanation as I will elaborate later may have some truth to it. Explanation ③ seem far fetched considering social conservatives are such a tiny minority of the readership and can be discounted as an explanation for what you say you experience. Of these explanations I think ① is the most likely. I think any of us talking about politics regardless of our positions probably eventually catch the attention of someone who feels like throwing a hissy fit. Right leaning posters have complained of people going through their comment history and down voting every post they’ve ever made. I’ve experienced such karmassasiantions in the past too.
Now having said this there have been signs of escalating tensions. Posters have been saying they feel more and moreunwelcome and I can totally see why since there are more and more posts that signal “liberal” tribal affiliations. Some like the article criticized by the links I gave are pretty blatant about this. Even some old time well respected posters like Yvain have recently been called out on not being bothered to avoid dog-whistling affiliations.
Now obviously you have some right wing digs like that in recent articles and they may be escalating too, but they are of a more alt-right not conservative nature. And yes any kind of alternative right sentiment, be it Moldbugian Neoreaction or consistent Paleoconservatism is basically being an intellectual hipster. This brings us back to ③ and I think also explains why left leaning users like Multiheaded fear they are losing the battle of ideas.
But it’s like I said before—it might be the wisest and most truth-seeking 3% (Vladimir_M alone has more life experience and practical wisdom than many other folks here combined, I’d say), the rest of us might be lagging behind in the race of ideas! I wouldn’t have gotten so worked up if I didn’t fear that might be the case.
If due to such superior intellectual fire power LessWrong ever got even 10% of conservative readership (still a tiny minority), the metacontrarians would probably cycle back to an exotic form of liberalism. And if that exotic form reached 10%, I’m betting some kind of libertarianism would be back in vogue… I need to again emphasise for the reader who didn’t follow the link that where something lands on the metacontrarian ladder does not tell us its truth value.
Now this kind of cycling is I think mostly self-corrective, since it is an intellectual fashion. The real problem in my mind is how political identification can create and escalate conflict between these somewhat shifting fads.
I suppose all I can do is mention that I don’t downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.
This. Posters should be encouraged to avoid down voting just political comments they disagree with. Also I think putting more emphasis on keeping your identify small or even apolitical might do us good.
Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse was a good thing that should be restored.
EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU’RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.
Don’t be freaked out. People politely complaining about being down voted seem to always get up voted on LessWrong. :)
Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse wasn’t a good thing that should be restored.
I used to be excited about the idea of harnessing the high intellectual ability and strong norms of politeness on LW to reach accurate insight about various issues that are otherwise hard to discuss rationally. However, more recently I’ve become deeply pessimistic about the possibility of having a discussion forum that wouldn’t be either severely biased and mind-killed or strictly confined to technical topics in math and hard sciences.
It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon. (In fact, it isn’t hard to identify the forces that inevitably make this situation unstable.) So, while OB ceased to be much of a discussion forum long ago, LW is currently in the final stages of turning into a forum that still has unusual smarts and politeness, but where on any mention of controversial issues, battle lines are immediately drawn and genuine discussion ceases, just like elsewhere. (Even if the outcome may still look very calm and polite by the usual internet standards.)
The trouble is, the only way a “no-mindkillers” rule can improve things is if it’s done in an extreme form and with ruthless severity, by reducing the permissible range of topics to strictly technical questions in some areas of math and hard science and consistently banning everything else. The worst possible outcome is to institute a partial “no-mindkillers” rule, which would work under a pretense that rational and unbiased discussion of a broad range of topics outside of math and hard sciences is possible without bringing up any controversial and charged issues, and without giving serious consideration to disreputable and low-status views. This would lead to an entrenched standard of cargo-cult “rationality” that incorporates all the biases, delusions, and taboos of the respectable opinion wholesale, under a pretense of a neutral, pragmatic, and unbiased restriction of irrelevant and distracting controversial topics.
Thus, it seems to me like the only realistic possibilities at this point are: (1) increasing ideological confrontations and mind-killing, (2) enforcement of the above-described cargo-cult rationality standards, and (3) reduction of discussion topics to strictly technical questions, backed by far stricter, MathOverflow-type standards. Neither of these looks like a fulfilment of LW’s mission statement, but (2) seems to me like the worst failure scenario from its point of view.
Uh huh. I fully endorse your analysis. Except that I’d say (1) would still leave us far better off than the typical confrontation-allowed political forum out there, because LWers would probably at least be willing to state their positions clearly, and would accept help in clarifying/refining those positions—even if the art of changing one’s mind should be lost, LW discussion would still retain some value. So I’d rather have (1) than (3).
Please consider that both Torture vs Specks and Three Worlds Collide are, as it seems to me, very much political—indeed, the latter could be construed as today’s very Blue vs Green with a touch of imagination, yet the debates on those have been quite OK.
It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon.
Are you concluding too hastily about the cause of deterioration? In the early days, OB had two major voices with conflicting ideologies. I think that’s what lent it greater intellectual excitement. I do not think it a matter of ideological alignments being absent in the golden age. Rather, it allowed space for discussion of fundamental differences—as opposed to the analysis down to quarks of the highly obvious that’s taken front seat today.
Consider this old posting on OB. The level of objectivity wasn’t higher, but the level of engagement with fundamental issues was.
If I remember correctly, you replied to several of my comments on fairly controversial topics recently, but for the record, I didn’t downvote any of them. I downvote direct replies to my comments only if I believe that someone is arguing in bad faith, or when I’m annoyed with some exceptionally bad failure of basic logic or good manners.
BTW… A few days ago I browsed through all comments I had posted in the past few months, and it looks like most of the comments that weren’t well received back then have since been upvoted to +1 to +3. How comes?
What’s more frustrating is getting upvotes, but they’re not for recent comments. I’d really like to know what’s attracting attention. And get notifications for comments on my posts.
Being new here, I’ve upvoted some comments on the original Sequences posts that were particularly insightful. Some of them were much more recent than the posts but probably still a year or two old. I did this under the assumption that other new people may be liable to read only the highly-rated comments on those original posts.
This is more likely to be a good model of how people’s reading habits work on newer posts than on old Sequence posts. Posts imported from Overcoming Bias have the comments in chronological order.
Aw, c’mon. I quip about it semi-seriously, and then you post all these dark suspicions in plain language! It’s no fun this way; don’t you want to feel persecuted by an evil conspiracy every once in a while? I demand that the ideological downvoting continue!
Why was this downvoted?
I’ve been noticing a lot of my comments get rapidly downvoted once shortly after I post them lately, especially (but not exclusively) in threads where I post libertarian-progressive-ish rebuttals to social-conservative positions.
I’d like to think that it’s just someone who doesn’t approve of political discussion on LW — but the socially conservative interlocutors don’t seem to be getting the same treatment. (With the exception of the ever-popular sam0345, whose low comment scores I expect have more to do with his hostile attitude than the fact that he posts about politics.)
So there does seem to be some Blue/Green unpleasantness going on here. Comments advocating “race realism”, sexual shame, or other socially conservative positions tend to float around +3 or +4, while responses disagreeing with them — even with citations to academic work and evidence on the subject — tend to float around −1 to +1.
It doesn’t bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I’d be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they’re not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I’m just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is “contrarian” really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it’s worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it’s the latter, well, I suppose all I can do is mention that I don’t downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.
(I don’t mind if this comment gets downvoted, by the way. I feel uncomfortable with discussions of the voting system, as they can become a meta rathole.)
EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU’RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.
I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside. My experiences have been similar, with many of my posts getting instantly down voted to −3 to −4, then slowly recovering karma later. As you probably recall from our recent conversations with me we have differing opinions on some politically charged subjects.
I don’t think you a bad poster and you seem to have a high karma score so we can mostly throw out ⓪. I recall often up voting posts by you, even the ones I disagree with and only recall downvoting a recent one where you seemed to be plain wrong in the context of the discussed article. In that case I also made a comment explaining why I thought it wrong. The contrarian explanation as I will elaborate later may have some truth to it. Explanation ③ seem far fetched considering social conservatives are such a tiny minority of the readership and can be discounted as an explanation for what you say you experience. Of these explanations I think ① is the most likely. I think any of us talking about politics regardless of our positions probably eventually catch the attention of someone who feels like throwing a hissy fit. Right leaning posters have complained of people going through their comment history and down voting every post they’ve ever made. I’ve experienced such karmassasiantions in the past too.
Now having said this there have been signs of escalating tensions. Posters have been saying they feel more and more unwelcome and I can totally see why since there are more and more posts that signal “liberal” tribal affiliations. Some like the article criticized by the links I gave are pretty blatant about this. Even some old time well respected posters like Yvain have recently been called out on not being bothered to avoid dog-whistling affiliations.
Now obviously you have some right wing digs like that in recent articles and they may be escalating too, but they are of a more alt-right not conservative nature. And yes any kind of alternative right sentiment, be it Moldbugian Neoreaction or consistent Paleoconservatism is basically being an intellectual hipster. This brings us back to ③ and I think also explains why left leaning users like Multiheaded fear they are losing the battle of ideas.
If due to such superior intellectual fire power LessWrong ever got even 10% of conservative readership (still a tiny minority), the metacontrarians would probably cycle back to an exotic form of liberalism. And if that exotic form reached 10%, I’m betting some kind of libertarianism would be back in vogue… I need to again emphasise for the reader who didn’t follow the link that where something lands on the metacontrarian ladder does not tell us its truth value.
Now this kind of cycling is I think mostly self-corrective, since it is an intellectual fashion. The real problem in my mind is how political identification can create and escalate conflict between these somewhat shifting fads.
This. Posters should be encouraged to avoid down voting just political comments they disagree with. Also I think putting more emphasis on keeping your identify small or even apolitical might do us good.
Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse was a good thing that should be restored.
Don’t be freaked out. People politely complaining about being down voted seem to always get up voted on LessWrong. :)
I used to be excited about the idea of harnessing the high intellectual ability and strong norms of politeness on LW to reach accurate insight about various issues that are otherwise hard to discuss rationally. However, more recently I’ve become deeply pessimistic about the possibility of having a discussion forum that wouldn’t be either severely biased and mind-killed or strictly confined to technical topics in math and hard sciences.
It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon. (In fact, it isn’t hard to identify the forces that inevitably make this situation unstable.) So, while OB ceased to be much of a discussion forum long ago, LW is currently in the final stages of turning into a forum that still has unusual smarts and politeness, but where on any mention of controversial issues, battle lines are immediately drawn and genuine discussion ceases, just like elsewhere. (Even if the outcome may still look very calm and polite by the usual internet standards.)
The trouble is, the only way a “no-mindkillers” rule can improve things is if it’s done in an extreme form and with ruthless severity, by reducing the permissible range of topics to strictly technical questions in some areas of math and hard science and consistently banning everything else. The worst possible outcome is to institute a partial “no-mindkillers” rule, which would work under a pretense that rational and unbiased discussion of a broad range of topics outside of math and hard sciences is possible without bringing up any controversial and charged issues, and without giving serious consideration to disreputable and low-status views. This would lead to an entrenched standard of cargo-cult “rationality” that incorporates all the biases, delusions, and taboos of the respectable opinion wholesale, under a pretense of a neutral, pragmatic, and unbiased restriction of irrelevant and distracting controversial topics.
Thus, it seems to me like the only realistic possibilities at this point are: (1) increasing ideological confrontations and mind-killing, (2) enforcement of the above-described cargo-cult rationality standards, and (3) reduction of discussion topics to strictly technical questions, backed by far stricter, MathOverflow-type standards. Neither of these looks like a fulfilment of LW’s mission statement, but (2) seems to me like the worst failure scenario from its point of view.
Uh huh. I fully endorse your analysis. Except that I’d say (1) would still leave us far better off than the typical confrontation-allowed political forum out there, because LWers would probably at least be willing to state their positions clearly, and would accept help in clarifying/refining those positions—even if the art of changing one’s mind should be lost, LW discussion would still retain some value. So I’d rather have (1) than (3).
Please consider that both Torture vs Specks and Three Worlds Collide are, as it seems to me, very much political—indeed, the latter could be construed as today’s very Blue vs Green with a touch of imagination, yet the debates on those have been quite OK.
I don’t think so. At least I can’t figure out which side is supposed to be which.
Me neither. Maybe we lack the imagination...
Are you concluding too hastily about the cause of deterioration? In the early days, OB had two major voices with conflicting ideologies. I think that’s what lent it greater intellectual excitement. I do not think it a matter of ideological alignments being absent in the golden age. Rather, it allowed space for discussion of fundamental differences—as opposed to the analysis down to quarks of the highly obvious that’s taken front seat today.
Consider this old posting on OB. The level of objectivity wasn’t higher, but the level of engagement with fundamental issues was.
If I remember correctly, you replied to several of my comments on fairly controversial topics recently, but for the record, I didn’t downvote any of them. I downvote direct replies to my comments only if I believe that someone is arguing in bad faith, or when I’m annoyed with some exceptionally bad failure of basic logic or good manners.
Cool, thanks. Good to know.
FWIW, I can recall upvoting at least one of yours which had previously been at −1.
Aargh, meta rathole …
BTW… A few days ago I browsed through all comments I had posted in the past few months, and it looks like most of the comments that weren’t well received back then have since been upvoted to +1 to +3. How comes?
Damned if I know.
What’s more frustrating is getting upvotes, but they’re not for recent comments. I’d really like to know what’s attracting attention. And get notifications for comments on my posts.
Being new here, I’ve upvoted some comments on the original Sequences posts that were particularly insightful. Some of them were much more recent than the posts but probably still a year or two old. I did this under the assumption that other new people may be liable to read only the highly-rated comments on those original posts.
This is more likely to be a good model of how people’s reading habits work on newer posts than on old Sequence posts. Posts imported from Overcoming Bias have the comments in chronological order.
Yes. I don’t even pay attention to the last two digits in my total karma score anymore.
Aw, c’mon. I quip about it semi-seriously, and then you post all these dark suspicions in plain language! It’s no fun this way; don’t you want to feel persecuted by an evil conspiracy every once in a while? I demand that the ideological downvoting continue!
Vast right-wing conspiracy, dude. (EDIT: meant largely as self-deprecating humour!)