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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong
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Comments (613)
Downvoted for retaliatory downvoting; voted everything else up toward 0.
Downvoted the parent and upvoted the grandparent. "On the grounds that you didn't understand my comment" is a valid reason for downvoting and based off a clearly correct observation.
I do agree that komponisto would have been better served by leaving off mention of voting altogether. Just "You didn't understand my comment. ..." would have conveyed an appropriate level of assertiveness to make the point. That would have avoided sending a signal of insecurity and denied others the invitation to judge.
Voted down all comments that talk about voting, for being too much about status rather than substance.
Vote my comment towards -1 for consistency.
Status matters; it's a basic human desideratum, like food and sex (in addition to being instrumentally useful in various ways). There seems to be a notion among some around here that concern with status is itself inherently irrational or bad in some way. But this is as wrong as saying that concern with money or good-tasting food is inherently irrational or bad. Yes, we don't want the pursuit of status to interfere with our truth-detecting abilities; but the same goes for the pursuit of food, money, or sex, and no one thinks it's wrong for aspiring rationalists to pursue those things. Still less is it considered bad to discuss them.
Comments like the parent are disingenuous. If we didn't want users to think about status, we wouldn't have adopted a karma system in the first place. A norm of forbidding the discussion of voting creates the wrong incentives: it encourages people to make aggressive status moves against others (downvoting) without explaining themselves. If a downvote is discussed, the person being targeted at least has better opportunity to gain information, rather than simply feeling attacked. They may learn whether their comment was actually stupid, or if instead the downvoter was being stupid. When I vote comments down I usually make a comment explaining why -- certainly if I'm voting from 0 to -1. (Exceptions for obvious cases.)
I really don't appreciate what you've done here. A little while ago I considered removing the edit from my original comment that questioned the downvote, but decided against it to preserve the context of the thread. Had I done so I wouldn't now be suffering the stigma of a comment at -1.
Then you must be making a lot of exceptions, or you don't downvote very much. I find that "I want to see fewer comments like this one" is true of about 1/3 of the comments or so, though I don't downvote quite that much anymore since there is a cap now. Could you imagine if every 4th comment in 'recent comments' was taken up by my explanations of why I downvoted a comment? And then what if people didn't like my explanations and were following the same norm - we'd quickly become a site where most comments are explaining voting behavior.
A bit of a slippery slope argument, but I think it is justified - I can make it more rigorous if need be.
Indeed I don't downvote very much; although probably more than you're thinking, since I on reflection I don't typically explain my votes if they don't affect the sign of the comment's score.
I think you downvote too much. My perception is that, other than the rapid downvoting of trolls and inane comments, the quality of this site is the result mainly of the incentives created by upvoting, rather than downvoting.
Yes, too much explanation would also be bad; but jimrandomh apparently wants none, and I vigorously oppose that. The right to inquire about a downvote should not be trampled upon!
I have no problem with your right to inquire about a downvote; I will continue to exercise my right to downvote such requests without explanation.
I consider that a contradiction.
From the recent welcome post (emphasis added):
The proper reason to request clarification is in order to not make the mistake again -- NOT as a defensive measure against some kind of imagined slight on your social status. Yes social status is a part of the reason for the karma system -- but it is not something you have an inherent right to. Otherwise there would be no point to it!
Some good reasons to be downvoted: badly formed assertions, ambiguous statements, being confidently wrong, being belligerent, derailing the topic.
In this case your statement was a vague disagreement with the intuitively correct answer, with no supporting argument provided. That is just bad writing, and I would downvote it for so being. It does not imply that I think you have no real idea (something I have no grounds to take a position on), just that the specific comment did not communicate your idea effectively. You should value such feedback, as it will help you improve your writing skills,
I reject out of hand any proposed rule of propriety that stipulates people must pretend to be naive supplicants.
When people ask me for an explanation of a downvote I most certainly do not take it for granted that by so doing they are entering into my moral reality and willing to accept my interpretation of what is right and what is a 'mistake'. If I choose to explain reasons for a downvote I also don't expect them to henceforth conform to my will. They can choose to keep doing whatever annoying thing they were doing (there are plenty more downvotes where that one came from.)
There is more than one reason to ask for clarification for a downvote - even "I'm just kinda curious" is a valid reason. Sometimes votes just seem bizarre and not even Machiavellian reasoning helps explain the pattern. I don't feel obliged to answer any such request but I do so if convenient. I certainly never begrudge others the opportunity to ask if they do so politely.
Not what Kompo was saying.
Feedback is valuable when it is informative, as the exchange with WrongBot turned out to be in the end.
Unfortunately, a downvote by itself will not typically be that informative. Sometimes it's obvious why a comment was downvoted (in which case it doesn't provide much information anyway); but in this case, I had no real idea, and it seemed plausible that it resulted from a misinterpretation of the comment. (As turned out to be the case.)
(Also, the slight to one's social status represented by a downvote isn't "imagined"; it's tangible and numerical.)
The comment was a quick answer to a yes-no question posed to me by Eliezer. Would you have been more or less inclined to downvote it if I had written only "Yes"?
Perhaps we have different ideas of what 'rights' and 'trampling upon' rights entail.
You have the right to comment about reasons for downvoting - no one will stop you and armed guards will not show up and beat you for it. I think it is a good thing that you have this right.
If I think we would be better off with fewer comments like that, I'm fully within my rights to downvote the comment; similarly, no one will stop me and armed guards will not show up and beat me for it. I think it is a good thing that I have this right.
I'm not sure in what sense you think there is a contradiction between those two things, or if we are just talking past each other.
I think you should be permitted to downvote as you please, but do note that literal armed guards are not necessary for there to be real problems with the protection of rights.
In such a context, when someone speaks of the "right" to do X, that means the ability to do X without being punished (in whatever way is being discussed). Here, downvoting is the analogue of armed guards beating one up.
Responding by pointing out that a yet harsher form of punishment is not being imposed is not a legitimate move, IMHO.
Status is an inherently zero-sum good, so while it is rational for any given individual to pursue it; we'd all be better off, cet par, if nobody pursued it. Everyone has a small incentive for other people not to pursue status, just as they have an incentive for them not to be violent or to smell funny; hence the existence of popular anti-status-seeking norms.
I don't think I agree, at least in the present context. I think of status as being like money -- or, in fact, the karma score on LW, since that is effectively what we're talking about here anyway. It controls the granting of important privileges, such as what we might call "being listened to" -- having folks read your words carefully, interpret them charitably, and perhaps even act on them or otherwise be influenced by them.
(To tie this to the larger context, this is why I started paying attention to SIAI: because Eliezer had won "status" in my mind.)
I agree with this.
While status may appear zero-sum amongst those who are competing for influence in a community, for the community as a whole, status is postive sum when in it accurately reflects the value of people to the community.