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Wei_Dai comments on Open Thread: February 2010 - Less Wrong
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I don't understand why lately my comments have been so often uncharitably interpreted. In this case, my "game" is:
(Upvoted.) ... okay, maybe my comment was in poor taste. What I was trying to get at is that there's something very---can I say odd?---about downvoting in order to avoid the appearance of having downvoted.
Well, the way I see it, votes are meant to convey information. When a comment is at -1, we (and the author of that comment) don't know if it was downvoted by the opponent of the author, or by someone independent. When it's at -2, we know at least one independent person downvoted it, so that's much more useful information.
Not to dump this on you, but I'm getting a bit frustrated at how often my comments are interpreted in the worst possible light, instead of given the benefit of doubt. After your criticism, it took me tens of minutes to think of a reply that I could be sure wouldn't gather further negative comments or downvotes.
If anyone has ideas what I could do about this, I'd really appreciate it. Otherwise I'm considering taking a break for a while. (ETA: I've decided to refrain from mentioning karma again, since that seems to be the main trigger, or to only do so with extreme caution.)
People don't like mentioning karma because karma is our quantified status, and we don't like to bring attention to our own status moves. They seem like legitimate points to me.
I'm sorry; I was being unfair. Downvote my first comment in this thread, please.
I also had a moment of self-awareness this morning---I just criticized you for voting for social-strategic reasons rather than solely the merit of the comment, but surely I was doing the same sort of thing that time when I upvoted Toby Ord even though I thought his comment was terrible because Toby Ord is a hotshot academic and I don't want him to think poorly of this community! Although speaking of self-awareness, maybe I should also mention that from introspection I can't tell if I would be having this same response if you weren't the eminent Wei Dai ...
Augh! Could it be that we at Less Wrong are smart enough to avoid all the ordinary status games, but not smart enough to avoid the meta recursive anti-status status games? O horror; O terrible humanity!
Not even close. It takes a lot of intellectual effort to keep track of what is actually going on in the conversations, even if they are slightly less 'Wrong' here.
Toby is a hot shot academic? Now that fits things together somewhat better.
Sometimes these labels don't make a lot of sense to the people they're applied to. I've in the past been called a "serious academic", amongst other dubious things.
FWIW I hope the result is that you don't feel forced away.
Thanks for the moral support, but I think what I need more is insights and ideas. :) Maybe I'll just stay away from anything meta, or karma related. In retrospect that seems to be what got me into trouble recently.