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shminux comments on Rationality Quotes June 2012 - Less Wrong
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"This whole notion of evolution vs creationism tradition in biology boggles my mind and lowers my already low opinion of biology in general even further. If two prominent schools cannot even agree on the basic ideas, those ideas are not worth agreeing on."
What?
EDIT: I am not aware that biology has a creationism tradition.
Larks can speak for themself, but I think their analogy was
analytic philosophy : continental philosophy :: (evolutionist) biology : creationism
so what seems to an outsider like a disagreement between schools is actually a disagreement between people doing "real" philosophy and goofy people doing something that they call philosophy.
(This seems overstated at best to me.)
Why was this downvoted? It points how a way that Larks's example is not analogous to shminux's.
My guess is that I gained some notoriety here and my comments tend to get a few downvotes because of this, rather than because of their content. Which tells me that I have to phrase my replies much more carefully. Still working on it. (If whoever silently downvoted some of my recent comments think that this guess is out to lunch, I'd greatly appreciate their feedback, here or in PM.)
I wasn't one of the silent downvoters, but I went ahead and downvoted without being silent because your comment just misunderstands Larks's. He did not even implicitly claim that there is a creationism tradition in biology, but rather an ongoing, publicized debate between evolution and creationism, which is analogous to analytic vs. continental philosophy, if one is laughably wrong but still famous for whatever reason.
I guess I fail to see an analogy between a debate between two factions in what is supposedly a science and that of science vs religion. In the latter case, it is easy to tell who the loony is, while in the former the only conclusion I can make is that they both are.
Hi, shminux. I recently downvoted this comment of yours. I did recognize you, but that's from seeing you in the lesswrong IRC channel, where you make a significant portion of the interesting discussion, not from lesswrong.com, where I don't generally look at the authors of comments or posts unless I'm having trouble following a discussion or I feel that it would be prudent to associate the author with their comment or post (for instance, I learned the name of user Nisan after they posted Formulas of Arithmetic That Behave Like Decision Agents, which contained a splendidly unusual amount of math for lw). I was particularly surprised by the low quality of your arguments in that thread, given my past experience with you. Still, I disliked one of your comments first, and saw your name second.
I also responded to one of your comments in that thread, here. I didn't further downvote your comments, because I make a point of not downvoting people whom I've engaged in discussion, just as a point of argumentative hygiene. Absent that, I might have downvoted every comment of yours that I read, without reply. I don't have any problem downvoting silently. It might be a polite norm to give feedback to any post or comment of low quality, but it is not a good use of my time in general, certainly not for that thread, in which many people were responding to you with comments to the effect that your conclusions were sloppy or informal. If other people behave as I do, then I would guess it was not one person who downvoted you, but a few people who did, and that the downvotes were given on the basis of your comments, rather than on who you are.
Thank you for your feedback! Upvoted. Though I don't believe I ever commented on the thread you mention. Maybe you mean some other thread. I'd also appreciate if you elaborate on what in particular constitutes "low quality" for you.
Yeah, there does seem to be some amount of karmassination going on here.
That's OK, it's a risk you run if you stick your neck out.