I think Desrtopa may have missed a level or two. For example downvotes do not only represent an evaluation of whether a given comment is useful for lesswrong and while votes are always evidence of something they are not strictly evidence that you are wrong. On the other hand there is something to the message he is attempting to convey that applies to a subset of the comments you write knowing that you will be downvoted.

You do write some comments that you know will be disapproved of, you know will be considered incomprehensible and you know that others will think are wrong. If you reason that in these cases "Less Wrong's extrapolated volition would have upvoted it" you are saying that everyone else is wrong and that you are right. This means some combination of:

• You think voters who downvote you will be be doing so for political reasons - political reasons that Lesswrong's extrapolated volition will not respect.
• If people don't understand you then that is their fault and not yours. Perhaps because they should consider your say so sufficiently important that they go and do background reading until they can piece together your meaning. Perhaps because you believe they are not trying hard enough to understand you due to their biases against topics that are incorrectly considered 'enemy' memes.
• You think those that do actually make the effort to parse your comment and disagree with you still are wrong because you are better at rational philosophy than they are.

Now, obviously you should expect me to disagree with you about whether it is good for you to make certain comments. This is the inevitable result of having different priors. I disagree with you about several premises which impact the value-of-comment evaluation. These relate to what the implications of TDT are on morality and the degree to which preferences of humans would be convergent when undergoing extrapolation.

There is another meta-consideration that I expect you have made. That is, when you think something is a good idea, know that other intelligent people think it is a bad idea and are able to update on their belief such that you are no longer as confident in your own it can sometimes still be useful to express your idea anyway. This prevents premature convergence and allows more of the search space to be explored and distributes attention somewhat closer to what the ideas deserve.

It is somewhat harder to apply the meta-consideration mentioned in the previous paragraph to comments along the lines of "I'm just so many levels above you, I don't care enough to write more clearly and if you downvote me it is just because you're political. Screw you all!" (if you'll pardon the wedrifid-speak). When saying that and expecting to be downvoted you have an implied disagreement on the meta-level benefit of people being told that they should respect you more or execute different political actions. That kind of say-it-even-if-they'll-hate it decision is less often a good one than say-it-if-they'll-hate-it object level comments.

That is a non-exhaustive list of the most obvious of the relevant meta stuff. It is somewhat frustrating that it took that much text to express thoughts that flew through my head in about five seconds. The vocabulary of English or myself is far more limited than the mental constructs.