I’ve been watching Less Wrong for a while, too, and feminist points of view get mixed responses, with the trend becoming somewhat more positive.
You were trolling in favor of something you support?
Gaah, PC is a problem. My impulse is to say “Are you completely out of your mind?”, which might be rude to people with mental problems, but I can’t seem to come up with alternate phrasing.
You were trolling in favor of something you support? …
This is more common than you’d think, particularly since “trolling” is often in the eye of the beholder. I do think that eridu’s style of advocacy is unlikely to be effective.
Yeah, the idea of trolling in favor of something one supports is fairly common—I was going to say something to that effect, but it got lost in revisions to my comment.
More generally, people seem to have a frequent impulse to harden the self-image of people they oppose into more stable opposition.
I don’t think I’m trolling in any sense of the word I know. I’m not being disingenous about my political beliefs, I’m not intentionally trying to incense anyone either—the people getting incensed are doing that by themselves, because (for the most part) they are men who are uncomfortable with feminism.
I just think it’s sort of a waste to say anything pro-feminist at less wrong people. I knew I was going to get lots of people disagreeing in roughly the same ways, asking the same 101-type questions, and probably disavowing any connection to “politics” (as if that were possible for humans to do!). And I got what I expcted—I was able to type lots of feminist screed, I linked to my favorite blog a few times, and I blew all my karma.
If you think feminism gets “mixed” responses on LW, you probably have a much more liberal idea of feminism than I do. In general, I’ve seen the anti-feminist current get diluted as the community grew and shifted from the hard “libertarianism” it used to have to the more liberal tint common on the Internet, but liberals are often just as anti-feminist as “libertarians,” just in different ways. (A good example is the treatment of polyamory on LW, and the “use rationality to get laid” threads that pop up every few months.)
I don’t think I’m trolling in any sense of the word I know. I’m not being disingenous about my political beliefs, I’m not intentionally trying to incense anyone either—the people getting incensed are doing that by themselves [...] I got what I expcted—I was able to type lots of feminist screed, I linked to my favorite blog a few times, and I blew all my karma.
We’re getting into something of a semantic tarpit here, so I propose we taboo “troll”.
Downvotes are, very roughly, an indication that people think you’re lowering the quality of discussion, either by commenting in bad faith, using words or arguments likely to spark more heat than light, or making such basic errors as to waste everyone’s time in fixing them. They’re an imprecise measure in that people’s preconceptions affect their estimation of these errors (a Neoplatonist and a follower of Sartre might have very different opinions of what constitutes foundational errors in reasoning), but I’d say they fall into the “subjectively objective” category: if you’ve picked up a downvote from someone, it’s very likely that you really have made that person less likely to engage with you productively.
All of which is to say that the line between being deliberately inflammatory and posting opinions you consider benign but which you expect to be poorly received from a karma perspective is so thin as to be effectively nonexistent. Particularly since you seem to think it’s amusing.
Downvotes are, very roughly, an indication that people think you’re lowering the quality of discussion
I disagree. I think that downvotes are an expression of how close a comment lies to the center of acceptable LW discourse as determined by the LW ingroup.
if you’ve picked up a downvote from someone, it’s very likely that you really have made that person less likely to engage with you productively.
But why? Is it because I’m “irrational,” or because I’m a feminist? Either one predicts the same behavior. At this point, I’m almost certainly getting downvoted because I’ve been downvoted before, not because anyone is making objective decisions regarding the discussion quality of my comments.
You might say this is “uncharitable,” but I think that it’s really just humanly realistic. The treatment of politics on LW, namely, “ignore politics,” invariably results in politics that are “unknown knowns” or tacit assumptions being massively preferred, and everything else getting downvoted. Politics isn’t socially taboo like people think, but rather restricted to the typical.
I happen to like arguing about feminism on the Internet—it’s an easy boost of fuzzies, and sometimes I might even learn something, as I consider myself to have done in this thread. But I know that if I do so on LW, it’ll cost me karma, and since I don’t really care about karma, I’m okay with that.
This isn’t about feminism, though—this is just about the shitty culture on LW, so I plan on cutting off this exchange here.
I’ve been watching Less Wrong for a while, too, and feminist points of view get mixed responses, with the trend becoming somewhat more positive.
You were trolling in favor of something you support?
Gaah, PC is a problem. My impulse is to say “Are you completely out of your mind?”, which might be rude to people with mental problems, but I can’t seem to come up with alternate phrasing.
This is more common than you’d think, particularly since “trolling” is often in the eye of the beholder. I do think that eridu’s style of advocacy is unlikely to be effective.
Yeah, the idea of trolling in favor of something one supports is fairly common—I was going to say something to that effect, but it got lost in revisions to my comment.
More generally, people seem to have a frequent impulse to harden the self-image of people they oppose into more stable opposition.
I don’t think I’m trolling in any sense of the word I know. I’m not being disingenous about my political beliefs, I’m not intentionally trying to incense anyone either—the people getting incensed are doing that by themselves, because (for the most part) they are men who are uncomfortable with feminism.
I just think it’s sort of a waste to say anything pro-feminist at less wrong people. I knew I was going to get lots of people disagreeing in roughly the same ways, asking the same 101-type questions, and probably disavowing any connection to “politics” (as if that were possible for humans to do!). And I got what I expcted—I was able to type lots of feminist screed, I linked to my favorite blog a few times, and I blew all my karma.
If you think feminism gets “mixed” responses on LW, you probably have a much more liberal idea of feminism than I do. In general, I’ve seen the anti-feminist current get diluted as the community grew and shifted from the hard “libertarianism” it used to have to the more liberal tint common on the Internet, but liberals are often just as anti-feminist as “libertarians,” just in different ways. (A good example is the treatment of polyamory on LW, and the “use rationality to get laid” threads that pop up every few months.)
We’re getting into something of a semantic tarpit here, so I propose we taboo “troll”.
Downvotes are, very roughly, an indication that people think you’re lowering the quality of discussion, either by commenting in bad faith, using words or arguments likely to spark more heat than light, or making such basic errors as to waste everyone’s time in fixing them. They’re an imprecise measure in that people’s preconceptions affect their estimation of these errors (a Neoplatonist and a follower of Sartre might have very different opinions of what constitutes foundational errors in reasoning), but I’d say they fall into the “subjectively objective” category: if you’ve picked up a downvote from someone, it’s very likely that you really have made that person less likely to engage with you productively.
All of which is to say that the line between being deliberately inflammatory and posting opinions you consider benign but which you expect to be poorly received from a karma perspective is so thin as to be effectively nonexistent. Particularly since you seem to think it’s amusing.
I disagree. I think that downvotes are an expression of how close a comment lies to the center of acceptable LW discourse as determined by the LW ingroup.
But why? Is it because I’m “irrational,” or because I’m a feminist? Either one predicts the same behavior. At this point, I’m almost certainly getting downvoted because I’ve been downvoted before, not because anyone is making objective decisions regarding the discussion quality of my comments.
You might say this is “uncharitable,” but I think that it’s really just humanly realistic. The treatment of politics on LW, namely, “ignore politics,” invariably results in politics that are “unknown knowns” or tacit assumptions being massively preferred, and everything else getting downvoted. Politics isn’t socially taboo like people think, but rather restricted to the typical.
I happen to like arguing about feminism on the Internet—it’s an easy boost of fuzzies, and sometimes I might even learn something, as I consider myself to have done in this thread. But I know that if I do so on LW, it’ll cost me karma, and since I don’t really care about karma, I’m okay with that.
This isn’t about feminism, though—this is just about the shitty culture on LW, so I plan on cutting off this exchange here.