Comment on What is missing from rationality?

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:35:52 GMT

No. I was very specific on purpose pinpointing exactly one comment.

I really am not inclined to argue about intended communication issues because that simply isn't a productive (or even amusing use of time) so I'm going to only address this issue once. You wrote:

Hahahahahaha. Ok I'll bite. Yes, I was thinking about 9/11 related posts. But the fact that I couldn't convince anyone doesn't bother me that much. What bothers me > is that just pointing to evidence that contradicts the established view on 9/11 here > is downvoted. See the following comment:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1r5v

You used the phrase "9/11 related posts" and then made a generalization about posts with "evidence." In standard discourse this would likely have been read as talking about a general problem and giving a specific example of that. This seems further supported by the fact that your previous comment had the remark that

I've also witnessed a certain disrespect for dissenters, comments that contradicted certain established views where downvoted

There may be a communication issue here. Let me ask then, are you only arguing that this single post in question was downvoted when it should not have been?

if you listened to the eye-witness testimony in question, the guy was trapped inside the building because the stairs were blown away and the electricity was turned off(so he couldn't use the elevator). If you claim that his testimony is wrong > you would have to explain why he was trapped inside the building and btw this happened before any of the main towers collapsed so you can't say "he was in shock" or what not.

I'm a bit confused by this claim. Trapped inside the building works perfectly well after the airplane crash without any explosion from a pre-planted device. Regarding your last remark, do you mean to imply that someone trapped without electricity in a burning building isn't going to have any shock issues or issues contributing to reliability simply because the building hasn't collapsed?

Ohhhh, please, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppressing here is a > whole list of definitions. If a comment gets downvoted to -3 it no longer appears on > the comment page(you have to specifically click to make it appear again). If that is > not supression we are speaking a different language here.

Well, it seems empirically that a lot of people click through on this thread (most obviously one can look at the karma scores within this subthread to verify that people are clicking through). We may in this case be speaking different languages in that I have trouble seeing how requiring an extra click constitutes suppression. The linked to dictionary seems to agree with me (with the usual caveats about dictionaries being descriptive not proscriptive objects).

The definitions listed are:

1 : to put down by authority or force : subdue

Doesn't seem relevant.

2 : to keep from public knowledge: as a : to keep secret b : to stop or prohibit the publication or revelation of

2b could very weakly maybe apply if you stretched it (is requiring an extra click prohibiting publication? I'd think not).

3 a : to exclude from consciousness b : to keep from giving vent to

Irrelevant. 4,5,6 are also irrelevant.

Finally yes, eye-witness testimonies are unreliable but this doesn't mean that you can discard them, that they are not evidence. So my point still stands.

No it really doesn't. You don't seem to have actually responded to any of my points about why we have a downvoting system. If evidence is sufficiently weak (such as this evidence where it isn't even obvious that it actually favors an alternative hypothesis over the currently judged as most likely hypothesis) then downgrading lets LW readers know that the comment is likely to not be useful for improving the correspondence between their map and the territory.

The remainder of your remark is contentless repetition of what you've already said.

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