There’s a big problem with upvotes and downvotes on LessWrong, namely that the two important but skew dimensions of agreement/disagreement and useful/disuseful for rating posts are collapsed into one feature. A downvote can feel like ‘Your comments are bad and you should feel bad (and leave and never post again)’, but this is often not the case.
Downvoting comments by a person asking why the parent comment was downvoted is generally poor form. In your case, it might be because you did it for a few comments in quick succession, which might have made Recent Comments (on the sidebar) less useable for someone so they downvoted the comments. To avoid this in future, maybe add a note in your comments when you post them noting that you are a new user trying to figure out how to tailor your comments to LessWrong and requesting that downvoters explain their downvotes to help you with this. On the other hand, it’s not impossible that someone was being Not Nice and mass-downvoting your comments, which wouldn’t be your fault.
Is “disuseful” a synonym for “unuseful” here or does it mean something else?
Downvoting comments by a person asking why the parent comment was downvoted is generally poor form. In your case, it might be because you did it for a few comments in quick succession,
I’ll add a specific way for newbies to ask why a comment was downvoted without clogging up the recent comments list: edit the original, downvoted comment, appending a little “Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, could someone explain?”-type note. (It’s obvious once you think of it, but easy not to realize independently.)
Is “disuseful” a synonym for “unuseful” here or does it mean something else?
It means something else. I use the dis- prefix to mean the active opposite of the thing to which it is prefixed. So ‘I diswant ice cream’ is a stronger statement than ‘I do not want ice cream’, though most people, whose language is less considered and precise, would (also) use the latter to cover the former. I guess some would say ‘I don’t particularly want ice cream’ to disambiguate somewhat.
I can see several possible connotations and policy suggestions underlying your comment, but not sure which one(s). Can you specify? Like, are you suggesting I update in this specific case or my general inclination to use nonstandard undefined terms or...?
So ‘I diswant ice cream’ is a stronger statement than ‘I do not want ice cream’, though most people, whose language is less considered and precise, would (also) use the latter to cover the former.
Minor point of information. In English “do not want” is not the negation of want. It actually means what you have defined “diswant” to mean. The “not” is privative here, not merely negative. People are not being less considered and precise when they use it this way. They are using the words precisely as everyone but you uses them—that is, precisely in accordance with what they mean.
You are welcome to invent a new language, just like English except that “not” always means simple negation and never means privation; but that language is not English. Neither, for that matter, would the corresponding modification of French be French. Comparing the morphology of translations of “want”, “do not want”, “have”, and “do not have” in a further selection of languages with Google Translate suggests that the range of languages for which this is the case is large.
Minor point of information. In English “do not want” is not the negation of want. It actually means what you have defined “diswant” to mean.
That is indeed often the case, though I notice I feel hesitant to agree that this is always the case and retain a feeling that people use ‘do not want’ in both way, depending on the context. Regardless, when I said:
So ‘I diswant ice cream’ is a stronger statement than ‘I do not want ice cream’
I meant (hohoho) this as a statement about my usage, not the common usage of others.
The “not” is privative here, not merely negative.
Thanks for pointing me to a further point of reference (the term ‘privative’).
un- from West Germanic; e.g. unprecedented, unbelievable
in- from Latin; e.g. incapable, inarticulate.
a-, called alpha privative, from Ancient Greek a-, a?-; e.g. apathetic, abiogenesis.
and it says:
A privative, named from Latin privare,[1] “to deprive”, is a particle that negates or inverts the value of the stem of the word.
It seems like your usage of privative was excluding alpha privative, i.e. mere negation, but the examples and this summary sentence suggest ‘privative’ fails to distinguish (hohoho again) between mere negation and...the other thing. (Inversion? Opposition?) I’d be most amused if linguists had failed to coin a specific term for the subform of privation that is the ‘active opposite’ of something, and had only given a name (‘alpha privative’) to the subform of mere negation.
People are not being less considered
In the literal sense that I have considered these things more than they have, they are.
and precise when they use it this way. They are using the words precisely as everyone but you uses them—that is, precisely in accordance with what they mean.
Localised examples like this seem trivial, but when generalised to encouraging good habits of thought and communication and precision, it’s not just a localised decision about ‘un-’ vs. ‘dis-’, but a more general decision about how one approaches thought, language, and communication.
Also, if you just look at ‘do not want’/‘diswant’ in a vacuum, then yes, it seems like both my usage and the common usage specify what they mean. But the broader question of using negation and ‘not’ in a way that cues the mental process of Thinking Like Logic is inextricable from specific uses of ‘not’. I generally lean towards the position that the upper echelons of a skill like Thinking Like Logic are only achieved by those who cut through to the skill in every motion, and that less comparmentalisation leads to better adoption of the skill. And I feel like it probably intersects with other skills and habits of thought. So trivial cases like this are part of a bigger picture.
I don’t think I understand what you mean by privative. Is it something like the difference between “na’e” and “to’e” in Lojban? For reference: {mi na’e djica} would mean “I other-than want”, and {mi to’e djica} would mean “I opposite-of want”.
That’s pretty much it. Privative “not” would be “to’e”. The English “not” covers both senses according to context, but “not want” is always privative and some lengthier phrase has to be used to express absence of wanting. Or not so lengthy, e.g. “meh”.
Hi Avi, welcome to LessWrong!
There’s a big problem with upvotes and downvotes on LessWrong, namely that the two important but skew dimensions of agreement/disagreement and useful/disuseful for rating posts are collapsed into one feature. A downvote can feel like ‘Your comments are bad and you should feel bad (and leave and never post again)’, but this is often not the case.
Downvoting comments by a person asking why the parent comment was downvoted is generally poor form. In your case, it might be because you did it for a few comments in quick succession, which might have made Recent Comments (on the sidebar) less useable for someone so they downvoted the comments. To avoid this in future, maybe add a note in your comments when you post them noting that you are a new user trying to figure out how to tailor your comments to LessWrong and requesting that downvoters explain their downvotes to help you with this. On the other hand, it’s not impossible that someone was being Not Nice and mass-downvoting your comments, which wouldn’t be your fault.
Is “disuseful” a synonym for “unuseful” here or does it mean something else?
I’ll add a specific way for newbies to ask why a comment was downvoted without clogging up the recent comments list: edit the original, downvoted comment, appending a little “Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, could someone explain?”-type note. (It’s obvious once you think of it, but easy not to realize independently.)
It means something else. I use the dis- prefix to mean the active opposite of the thing to which it is prefixed. So ‘I diswant ice cream’ is a stronger statement than ‘I do not want ice cream’, though most people, whose language is less considered and precise, would (also) use the latter to cover the former. I guess some would say ‘I don’t particularly want ice cream’ to disambiguate somewhat.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Is that different enough from “harmful” to merit a less standard word?
I can see several possible connotations and policy suggestions underlying your comment, but not sure which one(s). Can you specify? Like, are you suggesting I update in this specific case or my general inclination to use nonstandard undefined terms or...?
I was thinking about this specific case, but now that I think about it it does generalize.
Minor point of information. In English “do not want” is not the negation of want. It actually means what you have defined “diswant” to mean. The “not” is privative here, not merely negative. People are not being less considered and precise when they use it this way. They are using the words precisely as everyone but you uses them—that is, precisely in accordance with what they mean.
You are welcome to invent a new language, just like English except that “not” always means simple negation and never means privation; but that language is not English. Neither, for that matter, would the corresponding modification of French be French. Comparing the morphology of translations of “want”, “do not want”, “have”, and “do not have” in a further selection of languages with Google Translate suggests that the range of languages for which this is the case is large.
That is indeed often the case, though I notice I feel hesitant to agree that this is always the case and retain a feeling that people use ‘do not want’ in both way, depending on the context. Regardless, when I said:
I meant (hohoho) this as a statement about my usage, not the common usage of others.
Thanks for pointing me to a further point of reference (the term ‘privative’).
Edit: I looked at the Wikipedia article for privative
It gives some examples:
and it says:
It seems like your usage of privative was excluding alpha privative, i.e. mere negation, but the examples and this summary sentence suggest ‘privative’ fails to distinguish (hohoho again) between mere negation and...the other thing. (Inversion? Opposition?) I’d be most amused if linguists had failed to coin a specific term for the subform of privation that is the ‘active opposite’ of something, and had only given a name (‘alpha privative’) to the subform of mere negation.
In the literal sense that I have considered these things more than they have, they are.
Localised examples like this seem trivial, but when generalised to encouraging good habits of thought and communication and precision, it’s not just a localised decision about ‘un-’ vs. ‘dis-’, but a more general decision about how one approaches thought, language, and communication.
Also, if you just look at ‘do not want’/‘diswant’ in a vacuum, then yes, it seems like both my usage and the common usage specify what they mean. But the broader question of using negation and ‘not’ in a way that cues the mental process of Thinking Like Logic is inextricable from specific uses of ‘not’. I generally lean towards the position that the upper echelons of a skill like Thinking Like Logic are only achieved by those who cut through to the skill in every motion, and that less comparmentalisation leads to better adoption of the skill. And I feel like it probably intersects with other skills and habits of thought. So trivial cases like this are part of a bigger picture.
I don’t think I understand what you mean by privative. Is it something like the difference between “na’e” and “to’e” in Lojban? For reference: {mi na’e djica} would mean “I other-than want”, and {mi to’e djica} would mean “I opposite-of want”.
That’s pretty much it. Privative “not” would be “to’e”. The English “not” covers both senses according to context, but “not want” is always privative and some lengthier phrase has to be used to express absence of wanting. Or not so lengthy, e.g. “meh”.
Oh, cool. I’ve found the distinction to be a very useful one to make.