So how does your hypothesis explain that these hypothetical other readers consistently read one statement and disagree with it, and then read another statement disagreeing with the first statement, and disagree with that also?
You're assuming that these hypothetical other readers downvote for disagreement. It's completely possible to read an internet argument and think the entire thing is just stupid/poor quality/not worth wasting time on.
Here are posts I have made, followed by their voted score, followed by the number of comments.
Is your assumption that quality of post is proportional to the amount of discussion under it? (Edit: I see that indeed it is.) That seems like a huge assumption, especially since many long exchanges spin off from nitpicks and tangents. Also, the post of yours that generated the most comments was also really long, and even then a fair chunk of the replies were the descendants of my gendered language nudge.
Exactly. I'd guess (based on the stated justifications for voting that have been uttered in many LW threads) that most people don't vote based on disagreement but on what they want to see more of and what they want to see less of.
David Brin suggests that some kind of political system populated with humans and diverse but imperfectly rational and friendly AIs would evolve in a satisfactory direction for humans.
I don't know whether creating an imperfectly rational general AI is any easier, except that limited perceptual and computational resources obviously imply less than optimal outcomes; still, why shouldn't we hope for optimal given those constraints? I imagine the question will become more settled before anyone nears unleashing a self-improving superhuman AI.
An imperfectly friendly AI, perfectly rational or not, is a very likely scenario. Is it sufficient to create diverse singleton value-systems (demographically representative of humans' values) rather than a consensus (over all humans' values) monolithic Friendly?
What kind of competitive or political system would make fragmented squabbling AIs safer than an attempt to get the monolithic approach right? Brin seems to have some hope of improving politics regardless of AI participation, but I'm not sure exactly what his dream is or how to get there - perhaps his "disputation arenas" would work if the participants were rational and altruistically honest).