When my comment gets downvoted, it means that there is the tantalizing possibility of me excising a false belief from my mind.
A downvote doesn’t increase the possibility of your losing a false belief. It just means that someone, somewhere, decided to hit one button over another.
You have no idea who voted you down, and as we don’t have clear standards as a group, you can’t even make a stab in the dark as to why some individuals disapproved. It’s a popularity measure, nothing more.
A downvote doesn’t increase the possibility of your losing a false belief. It just means that someone, somewhere, decided to hit one button over another.
My working assumption is that votes on Less Wrong provide greater than zero information, i.e. that the hitting of the “down” button correlates positively with a poor comment.
My own experience is that positive and negative scores have little if any relation to the quality of a comment.
Also, total signal strength matters. The few massively-negative comments I’ve seen I agree are bad, but the ones with only a few negatives often don’t strike me as deserving their scores.
As most comments don’t receive any feedback, positive or negative, having a score of −1 only means that one person cared enough to make the comment and two cared enough to vote it down, for whatever reason.
It would be nice to be able to see total number of positive and negative votes, to see which comments are the most contentious, but that’s not currently a feature.
When my comment gets downvoted, it means that there is the tantalizing possibility of me excising a false belief from my mind.
A downvote doesn’t increase the possibility of your losing a false belief. It just means that someone, somewhere, decided to hit one button over another.
You have no idea who voted you down, and as we don’t have clear standards as a group, you can’t even make a stab in the dark as to why some individuals disapproved. It’s a popularity measure, nothing more.
My working assumption is that votes on Less Wrong provide greater than zero information, i.e. that the hitting of the “down” button correlates positively with a poor comment.
(shrug)
My own experience is that positive and negative scores have little if any relation to the quality of a comment.
Also, total signal strength matters. The few massively-negative comments I’ve seen I agree are bad, but the ones with only a few negatives often don’t strike me as deserving their scores.
As most comments don’t receive any feedback, positive or negative, having a score of −1 only means that one person cared enough to make the comment and two cared enough to vote it down, for whatever reason.
It would be nice to be able to see total number of positive and negative votes, to see which comments are the most contentious, but that’s not currently a feature.