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Will_Newsome comments on Suffering as attention-allocational conflict - Less Wrong
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Comments (61)
That social norm always made sense to me: Simple disagreement doesn't provide much information, unless you provide a reason. Even a short reason gives me a "hook" to evaluate why you might disagree, or to do research.
The exception would be if an expert's intuitive evaluation is saying "this seems wrong to me", at which point I have a good reason to dig in to it myself.
Besides, if you don't want to bother explaining why, then either you're trying to outsource the cognitive cost to me (in which case you probably don't care whether I change my mind), or you don't consider it worth the cognitive cost in the first place - either way, there's no reason for me to believe that your disagreement is worth following up on.
Especially here on LessWrong, the "Vote Down" button seems the simplest way to disagree without explaining any farther, and avoids the social issue entirely.
I think "I agree" is somewhat more acceptable because it at least adds a little emotional bonus of "yay, the tribe supports me!" whereas "I disagree" is a very mild hostile bump of "eek, the tribe might exile me!" That said, I've seen plenty of communities where "I agree" is considered a taboo statement, and I always find it sort of surprising how often I actually see it around here :)
tl;dr: a chorus of "I agree" / "I disagree" is simply adding noise to communication.
I disagree. ;) Specifically because knowing who disagrees with me gives me way more evidence than just knowing that someone disagrees with me. Practically speaking I do not consider downvotes evidence that I am wrong (they are generally just evidence that people dislike what I say because it sounds pretentious or because it pattern matches to something that could be wrong), whereas I would consider a simple "I disagree" comment from e.g. Nick Tarleton some evidence that I was wrong and should spend effort finding out why. (This isn't mostly because Nick is a good thinker (though he is) but that I think it's a lot less likely he'll uncharitably misinterpret what I'm trying to say, whereas an "I disagree" comment from Vladimir Nesov is a lot less evidence that I'm wrong even though he is also an excellent thinker.)
Obviously "I disagree" plus a short reason is better and normally not much more difficult, but this would also be a lot easier to do in a community where just "I disagree" was acceptable.
nods If it's someone whose name I recognize and whose opinion I value, that tends to get handled similar to an "expert's intuitive evaluation". I don't know how tight-knit the community is here, and what percentage of "I disagree" messages end up triggering that here, but most communities I've seen aren't tight-knit enough for it to be meaningful except possibly when said by a "tribal leader".
You do make a good point about the acceptability of "I disagree" influencing the acceptability of "I disagree because of this brief reason" :)
Strongly agree on every point.
While downvotes always contain evidence that evidence contains more information about the social reality than the conceptual one. It is useful information, just not necessarily information about facts or accuracy.