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timtyler comments on Boo lights: groupthink edition - Less Wrong
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Re: "Please reconsider: your behaviour devalues the technical meaning of "groupthink""
It sounds like an attempt to raise the barrier for groupthink accusations - if you have to do a lot of extra work documenting the evidence before expressing your opinion.
IMO, people's opinions are often of interest - even without detailed references - and realizing that doesn't devalue any technical meanings.
It is best to see groupthink accusations as a cheap warning mechanism, IMO. Like pain in other words. Some false alarms are OK - while a failure to notice where a problem is occurring can be more problematical.
I probably should have linked to this article, but I'm not done reading it yet. It makes somewhat similar points to yours.
Yes these accusations can serve a useful purpose. The point of this post is that the next time a comment like this pops up, it can be dealt with in a shorter reply, "Downvoted for boo lights; you are calling groupthink on a discussion which is actually a sincere inquiry, either do your homework or move along."
Down-voting is an even less-informative kind of booing. At least a groupthink accusation explains what it thinks the problem is.
Yes, maybe it would be nice to have a detailed analysis, but is it really desirable to encourage deliberate punishment of posters who are trying to point our biases for not going into more detail? It seems as though the probable effect of such a policy would be fewer groupthink accusations - and more unidentified groupthink.
I believe it's desirable, for the same reason we should discourage the boy who cries wolf.
I also understand where you're coming from. The danger of escalation - increasing committment to a failing course of action - can be big. Maybe, if we knew the relevant parameters, we would want to tolerate more such accusations than we currently do, rather than fewer, given a big enough payoff in the rare cases where they'd turn out to be on the money.
Here we seem to be discussing the policy of down-voting the wolf-crier who doesn't come with recent video footage of the wolf. I figure that is reasonable if there is reasonable independent evidence of no wolf, or a history of false positives - but otherwise not.
Remember the context of the comment linked upthread: this is someone voicing accusations of groupthink in the "Survey of Anti-Cryonics Writing" post... the equivalent of crying wolf in the middle of a quiet evening in the sheepfold.
The post tries to make a general point, not confined to one particular comment.
The "cryonics groupthink" accusation is not obviously wrong. IMO, it probably has some truth to it. Blogs naturally attract like-minded individuals. There are often major "yes men" effects at work - along with mindless copying of group ideas, eagerness to display badges of group membership - and so on.
IMO, there is more to it than groupthink. Identification with your ego is ubiquitous in western society - and the expression of that in geeks tends to result in an interest in cryonics. Ultimately, it probably has something to do with traditional western religions being so farcical, while western secular institutions offer little guidance.