As expected, my previous comment was downvoted almost immediately.

This would, for reference, be an example of the reason why some people believe LW is a cult that suppresses dissent. After all, it's significantly easier to say that you disagree with something than it is to explain in detail why you disagree; just as it's far easier to state agreement than to provide an insightful statement in agreement. Nonetheless, community norms dictate that unsubstantiated disagreements get modded down, while unsubstantiated agreements get modded up. Naturally, there's more of the easy disagreement then the hard disagreement... that's natural, since this is the Internet, and anyone can just post things here.

In any event, though, the end result is the same; people claim to want more dissent, but what they really mean is that they want to see more exceptionally clever and well-reasoned dissent. Any dissent that doesn't seem at least half as clever as the argument it criticizes seems comparatively superfluous and trivial, and is marginalized at best. And, of course, any dissent that is demonstrably flawed in any way is aggressively attacked. That really is what people mean by suppression of dissent. It doesn't really mean 'downvoting arguments which are clever, but with which you personally disagree'... community norms here are a little better then that, and genuinely good arguments tend to get their due. In this case, it means, 'downvoting arguments which aren't very good, and with which you personally disagree, when you would at the same time upvote arguments that also aren't very good, but with which you agree'. Given the nature of the community norms, someone who expresses dissent regularly, but without taking the effort to make each point in an insightful and terribly clever way, would tend to be downvoted repeatedly, and thus discouraged from making more dissent in the future... or, indeed, from posting here at all.

I don't know if there's a good solution to the problem. I would be inclined to suggest that, like with Reddit, people not downvote without leaving an explanation as to why. For instance, in addition to upvoting some of srdiamond's earlier comments, I have also downvoted some of Rain's, because a number of Rain's comments in this thread fit the pattern of 'poor arguments that support the community norms', in the same sense that srdiamond's fit the pattern of 'poor arguments that violate the community norms'; my entire point here is that, in order to cultivate more intelligent dissent, there should be more of the latter and less of the former.