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michaelsullivan comments on Suffering as attention-allocational conflict - Less Wrong
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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 that a vote down fulfills this function. A vote down does not say "i disagree", it says "I want to see less of some feature of this comment/article in the Less Wrong stream".
Sometimes that's because I disagree strongly enough to consider it foolishness and not worth discussion. But most of the time, a vote down is for other reasons. I do find that I am much more likely to vote down comments that I disagree with, and I suspect this is true for most/all Less Wrongers. But that's because I am more likely to be looking harder for problems in posts I disagree with due to all the various biases in my thinking. Disagreement alone is insufficient reason for a vote down from me, and I hope that is true for almost everyone here.
Seconded. Agreement/disagreement shouldn't be a reason for up- or downvoting.
My personal policy is to never downvote immediate replies to my own comments. There's too much of a risk that I'll downvote something simply because I disagree with it.