Spectral_Dragon comments on One possible issue with radically increased lifespan - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Spectral_Dragon 30 May 2012 10:24PM

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Comment author: JenniferRM 31 May 2012 02:37:45AM 16 points [-]

Upvoted after seeing the comment. I thought about downvoting when I came to the thread and thought of doing so for a minute or three. The problem I had was the title's tone of summarizing once and for all what "the consequences of transhumanism are" and then doing the job really really poorly. I have a vague (but declining?) "my tribe"-feeling towards transhumanism and don't like seeing it bashed, or associated with straw-man-like arguments.

I think a title that avoided this inclination could have been something like "Is immortalist demography bleak?" or maybe "I fear very long lives lead to resources crunches and high gini coefficients" or you know... something specific and tentative rather than abstract and final. Basically, good microcontent.

One thing I've just had to get used to is that LWers are bad at voting. Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted. Whatever people see first, right after an article will generally get upvoted much more than normal. Its not because quality comes first when sorting by that, because if you look at ancient posts where the sort order of comments is forced to be chronological, the very first comment will frequently have many upvotes even when it is inane.

I've been wondering how to "fix it" but I have nothing concrete. I fear that it is just that "typical internet users" are habituated to clicking on accessible "like" buttons because that's how they interact with facebook, and internet communities inevitably decay absent heroically good site design/management, and so on.

Comment author: Spectral_Dragon 31 May 2012 12:04:51PM 3 points [-]

Thank you! That was what I was looking for in a title, I just couldn't seem to find the right words. I'll be editing the title in a minute. I also got pretty intimidated - within 10 minutes I'd lost about a fifth of my total karma and no one would tell me why. That seems to me another weakness - we are too quick to vote and seemingly not good enough at debating some topics and explaining WHY something deserves to be voted up/down.

Comment author: RobertLumley 31 May 2012 01:44:57PM 1 point [-]

I was very unhappy to see this downvoted as much as it was, although I thought it may have been because of something in the sequences I hadn't gotten to yet. But I especially try to avoid downvoting new people who are obviously making an effort, as you were. So I'm glad this corrected itself.