First you claimed there was bias involved in eating animals. It is eminently reasonable to interpret your responses as being connected to that claim.
No, it isn't at all reasonable. My comment was a direct reply to Eliezer's and was explicitly addressed as an answer to his rationale for downvoting my comment. You need to make an effort to keep the separate strands of the debate separate, otherwise you'll misinterpret the structure of the different arguments.
If I was in error, and you have no care at all about eating animals
Wait, why does it follow from my saying you were in error that I had "no care at all about eating animals"?
That you can easily generate past examples of the 1% where they are not bullshit is not an argument for not downvoting such claims - any more than you easily generating examples of past lottery winners is an argument to play the lottery.
I didn't claim in this context that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for not downvoting such claims. I claimed that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for concluding that Eliezer's claim was false.
For my actual views on the appropriateness of downvoting such comments, see the other subthreads in this debate.
There is a prescriptive/descriptive divide here, and it does us no good to dance either side of it.
Descriptively:
Eliezer's claim that comments of that form will get downvoted may be factually incorrect, given that it's possible to, as you showed, create comments of that form that express sentiments most people would upvote.
The qualifier "almost" placed in front of his comment would suffice to cover these situations.
Prescriptively:
...I don't think that any comment that fits that form should be "automatically [...] downvoted to oblivion"
There's a Less Wrong meetup at my house in Berkeley this Saturday, the 25th of December, at 6PM. Celebrate the winter season, the Solstice, and the birth of Sir Isaac Newton among friendly aspiring rationalists, including Eliezer and other SIAI staff and volunteers.
I will cook for everyone in the style I call "paleolithic gourmet" which is cooked meat and raw produce.
I'd like to satisfy everyone's preferences as reasonably as I possibly can without getting vastly more food than will be eaten.
Default menu:
Steak
Lamb Burgers
Bacon
Salad of Berkeley Bowl produce and parmesan
Grilled Portabello and chanterelle mushrooms
Cheese selection
Pita + hummus
Cookies
Feel free to bring a potluck dessert or if you like, an alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage.
The food is free, but if you can afford to, in the spirit of Newtonmas, I suggest a $10 or $15 or $500 donation to SIAI (which will be matched). Please don't not come because you prefer not to pay; no one will be excluded from food or shunned for not paying. I really mean that. Consider the donation not an admission fee and more of a gentle nudge and reminder that optimal philanthropy starts around $10 and that you should positively associate giving money with the fuzzies of eating delicious food.
Please post here if you plan on attending and RSVP on Facebook. You can also post here or PM me with your thoughts on the menu and tell me what you want to eat the most of. I wasn't planning on cooking fish or chicken but can do so if people let me know they want fish or chicken or something else (like a carbohydrate).
My address is 1622 Martin Luther King Jr Way Apt A, Berkeley CA. It's the ground floor apartment around the side, not the upstairs one.