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Desrtopa comments on 6 Tips for Productive Arguments - Less Wrong
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Comments (121)
I agree that downvoting new people is a bad idea - and every comment in the Welcome Thread should get a load of karma.
However, I think people should aggressively downvote - at the very least a couple of comments per page.
If we don't downvote, comments on average get positive karma - which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there's a high chance of positive karma.
However, we don't want these posts. They clutter LW, increasing noise. The reason we read forums rather than random letter sequences is because forums filter for strings that have useful semantic content; downvoting inane or uninsightful comments increases this filtering effect. I'd much rather spent a short period of time reading only high quality comments than spend longer reading worse comments.
Worse, it can often be hard to distinguish between a good comment on a topic you don't understand and a bad one. Yet I get much more value spending time reading the good one, which might educate me, than the bad one, which might confuse me - especially if I have trouble distinguishing experts.
Downvotes provide the sting of (variable) negative reinforcement. In the long run, well kept gardens die by pacificism.
We should expect comments on average to get positive karma, as long as the average member is making contributions which are on the whole more wanted than unwanted. Attempting to institute a minimum quota of downvoted comments strikes me as simply ridiculous. If the least worthwhile comment out of twenty is still not an actual detraction from the conversation, there's no reason to downvote it.
If we're just concerned with the average quality of discourse, it would be simpler to just cut off the whole community and go back to dialogues between Eliezer and Robin,.
The most significant dialog between Eliezer and Robin (Foom debate) was of abysmally low quality - relative to the output of either of those individuals when not dialoging with each other. I have been similarly unimpressed with other dialogs that I have seen them have in blog comments. Being good writers does not necessarily make people good at having high quality dialogs. Especially when their ego may be more centered around being powerful presenters of their own ideas than in being patient and reliable when comprehending of the communication of others.
If we want high quality dialog have Eliezer write blog posts and Yvain engage with them.
Yep. I did write this article hoping that LWers would benefit from it, and EY was one of those LWers. (Assuming his arguing style hasn't changed since the last few times I saw him argue.)