I found the question "What is wrong with this person?" quite interesting and some of the responses were insightful in this regard. We don't get to encounter extreme irrationality very often and I think the experience of failing to communicate is a good one to have occasionally. Being reminded what bad epistemic hygiene looks like is a great reminder to keep washing up. I also think one or two of the replies include good material to put on a Less Wrong intro/about/faq page if we ever get around to doing it.

The problem is that once you start arguing with someone giving up without resolution is like ending sex before orgasm. So it went on much longer than it should have.

Do people get their downvotes back when a downvoted comment is deleted?

As of about 9 months ago, no.

Not that I know of. If one were going to implement a behavior like that, people would get downvotes back when a post went to -3 or under and became invisible by default. But coding resources are scarce.

But it's not Bayesian Judo: you can't argue with a rock, a person whose intent is to ignore what you say.

I will admit that I feel differently.

All of this commenter’s comments are contained in a single thread, of which adefinitemaybe is the parent. It will already be down-voted to the bottom of the Open Thread, so when these comments are no longer ‘Recent’, if someone is reading this far, it is because they find this thread interesting -- or even hilarious, like I do.

I find the thread hilarious not only because the dialogue is clever, but also because I'm enjoying the feeling that adefinitemaybe is the mad, crazy, irreverent jester in the court who provides us the opportunity to laugh at ourselves.

I mean, this is great stuff:

Really though, do you guys ever just say die, from the get go, and move on to the next, actually debatable, thing? It's like a threw ball or som.... {Woof!} As I was saying, it's like I threw a B-A-L-L or something.

It’s a problem if someone is belligerent all the time, and it’s really annoying if they post in more than one thread. (The last troll was really quite a troll because he would drop inane comments all over the place – down-voting those comments would do nothing to hide them because they were nested in otherwise good threads.)

Given that I happen to enjoy this character (without approving of the behavior) – thinking, say, of Han Solo or even Churchill -- I would like to suggest the following umbrella solution for all troublesome behavior; trolls and belligerent personalities alike:

A person can’t comment unless their karma is above -10, and this should be announced in some apparent place. That way people with belligerence and intelligence can game their comments so that they don’t go below the threshold. Keep in mind that this really would force them to be a positive influence; because the community could always down-vote all their comments to kick them out.