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JulianMorrison comments on Being saner about gender and rationality - Less Wrong
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Your concern is fine but your suggested solutions amount to shooting off your arm to cure a bee-sting. The community seems to me nowhere near as polarized as you suggest.
I think this is twaddle.
If by "respond to the downvoting in kind" you mean something like "start downvoting articles from the Evil Feminists even when there's nothing in the articles themselves that would have made us downvote them if they'd been written by other people", then it's that that would be the first step to a "karma cartel" situation. (And "in kind" would be just plain dishonest.)
If by "respond to the downvoting in kind" you mean something like "start downvoting articles that we think have negative net contribution to the Less Wrong community because they encourage harmful attitudes", then you should be doing that and there's nothing cartel-like about it.
Furthermore, as a participant in some of these discussions, I have made a point of generally not downvoting comments I disagree with, nevermind other comments by the same people.
On the other hand, I've actually had roughly 80 unrelated comments of mine downvoted, and for various reasons suspect it was probably by someone who disagreed with me on precisely this topic of gender-related attitudes.
It's also worth noting that we've been explicitly encouraged to downvote comments we think contribute negatively to LW, and much of what Alicorn complained about falls firmly in my category of "thoughtlessly rude behavior that lowers the quality of the discussion".
I don't think most people think that's what downvotes are for. But that's been discussed at great length.
Specifically, I'm under the impression downvote means 'I want to see fewer comments like this' at its basis, and any other analysis of what it means proceeds from that and our community standards.
ETA: FWIW, Eliezer has agreed
At some point we really do have to enforce community norms to prevent the level of discourse from deteriorating. Antisocial and obnoxious behavior are perfectly valid reasons to downvote a comment, I have a hard time believing you really think they aren't, and I'm reasonably confident that most of LW is okay with the idea, judging by other comments I've seen receive downvotes (not to pick on him, but Annoyance has gotten some of this) for no obvious reason other than tone.
The issues are where to draw the lines, and how to handle it when the community is sharply divded on what constitutes "polite, respectful discussion". Frankly, the main person I see drawing "us vs. them" lines here is you.
As clunky as it is, this is a major virtue of the LessWrong anti-kibitzer script.
Yup, you could just install that if you're that worried.
Agreed. You should already be doing that. I routinely downvote comments that I think are harmful to Less Wrong. Isn't that basically what voting is for?
Who gives a crap about individual karma, anyway?
Well, total karma becomes rather meaningless after a certain level; it mostly just means you've posted a lot. Ratings of individual comments and posts are interesting, though.