Author's Notes

I wrote this to be accessible to a general audience. I didn't announce this at the top of the post, like previous posts of this type have done, because I thought it would be weird for a member of the general audience to see "this was written for a general audience" or "share this with your friends" at the beginning of a post they were about to read.

However, it's not just for a general audience; I'm hoping it will be useful for Less Wrong users who realize they haven't been following one or more of these tips. (Like so much on Less Wrong, think of it as a list of bugs that you can check your thinking and behavior for.)

I realize the position I'm taking on holding back downvotes is somewhat extreme by current standards. But the negative externalities from excess downvoting are hard for us to see. My best friend, an intelligent and rational guy whose writing ability is only so-so, was highly turned off by Less Wrong when the first comment he made was voted down.

If we really feel like we need downvoting for hiding and sorting things, maybe we could mask the degree of downvoting by displaying negative integers as 0? I think this is what reddit does for submissions. Right now, I suspect that heavily downvoted items actually attract attention, like a car crash, as evidenced by the fact that lots of stuff is voted down significantly below "hide threshold" levels.

I'm certainly not perfect at following these tips. If you notice me violating my own advice, please leave a message in my feedback form.

This post was inspired by an argument I had with a fellow Less Wrong user in which both of us failed to follow some of these tips in retrospect.

I chose to use the word "arguer" instead of "opponent" to emphasize that the relationship doesn't have to be adversarial.

Props to jkaufman for prior art in writing about these ideas.