Please don’t see downvotes as rejection. People on LessWrong downvote each other like crazy all the time.
There was this post discussing whether AI are being enslaved which got −46 karma. The top comment compared the post to “taking a big 💩 in public”
The post author later wrote another post in a similar vein, strongly criticizing people who downvoted her last time. Somehow the hivemind changed its mind and upvoted her this time.
Don’t take downvotes too seriously :)
Of course, if you’re looking for more than just upvotes, but for the post to have a major effect on the community’s beliefs and strategies. My pessimistic take is that a single post almost never accomplishes this. Even a great post by Eliezer Yudkowsky usually has negligible influence on the community, except when he gets very lucky.
LessWrong is full of people frustrated at their words falling on deaf ears. Here is an example, Applying superintelligence without collusion, by Eric Drexler. He reflects despairingly that:
At t+7 years, I’ve still seen no explicit argument for robust AI collusion, yet tacit belief in this idea continues to channel attention away from a potential solution-space for AI safety problems, leaving something very much like a void.
I appreciate that—and I can see how someone familiar with the site would interpret it that way. But as a new member, I wouldn’t have that context.
And honestly, if it were just downvotes, it wouldn’t be such a problem. The real issue is the hand-waving dismissal of arguments that haven’t even been read, the bad faith responses to claims never made, the strawmen, and above all the consistent avoidance of the core points I lay out.
This is supposed to be a community that values clear thinking and honest engagement. Ironically, I’ve had far more of that elsewhere.
Please don’t see downvotes as rejection. People on LessWrong downvote each other like crazy all the time.
There was this post discussing whether AI are being enslaved which got −46 karma. The top comment compared the post to “taking a big 💩 in public”
The post author later wrote another post in a similar vein, strongly criticizing people who downvoted her last time. Somehow the hivemind changed its mind and upvoted her this time.
Don’t take downvotes too seriously :)
Of course, if you’re looking for more than just upvotes, but for the post to have a major effect on the community’s beliefs and strategies. My pessimistic take is that a single post almost never accomplishes this. Even a great post by Eliezer Yudkowsky usually has negligible influence on the community, except when he gets very lucky.
LessWrong is full of people frustrated at their words falling on deaf ears. Here is an example, Applying superintelligence without collusion, by Eric Drexler. He reflects despairingly that:
I appreciate that—and I can see how someone familiar with the site would interpret it that way. But as a new member, I wouldn’t have that context.
And honestly, if it were just downvotes, it wouldn’t be such a problem. The real issue is the hand-waving dismissal of arguments that haven’t even been read, the bad faith responses to claims never made, the strawmen, and above all the consistent avoidance of the core points I lay out.
This is supposed to be a community that values clear thinking and honest engagement. Ironically, I’ve had far more of that elsewhere.