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Viliam_Bur comments on Let's be friendly to our allies - Less Wrong
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Comments (46)
The downvoting was related to the poor content of the article. It was essentially this:
If the same article would be written by someone else, I would recommend them to ask the same question in the Open Thread. Should I vote differently just because of the person who wrote it? So now voting about articles is no longer about their quality, but becomes a political question?
Our allies are also expected to follow the local rules. We could make exception if this were the first article about 80,000 Hours on LW, so the main information of the article would be "80,000 Hours exists", but obviously that's not the case. The best way to promote friendship with our allies, is to write articles about them that actually provide information. For example, I would upvote a well-written article about "What is 80,000 Hours, what are their goals, and what exactly did they accomplish in the recent year". Because such article would contain interesting information.
I would suggest that instead of downvoting until no one can see the post, you explain to them how to make their post better. I'm not even asking you to upvote, I'm just asking you not to hide important content, or if you do, at least constructively help your ally make better content. Even if LessWrong is aware of 80,000 Hours, the staff at 80,000 Hours might not be super-familiar with LessWrong, and so might accidentally violate certain local norms. Punishing them for this, rather than helpfully correcting them, is what seems counterproductive to me. Once you explain the norms, then you should feel totally free to criticize things that don't adhere to them.
Basically everything you do has political repercussions. Insisting otherwise will probably lead to poor results.
The problem is I would rather spend my time discussing posts I like rather than critiquing posts I don't like. In this case, I saw that someone had already started the meta-discussion, so I downvoted and didn't pursue the matter further.
I am sorry that this hurts someone else's agenda. But I don't want to be a part of that game. And I don't appreciate efforts to guilt me into taking part.
I don't think he's trying to guilt you, he's just offering reasoning and discussion for his own stance. He's providing more information than a simple down vote, and I think that should be applauded.
I will admit the original post could have probably been written better, but I don't think we should be discouraging someone from questioning voting - especially when they're willing to engage in discourse, provide feedback, and suggest alternatives. It's an essential dialogue to keeping our garden well tended, even if his tone was a bit accusative ("I'm disappointed" instead of "Hey, what's going on here?")
I don't have a problem with people talking about upvotes and downvotes (well, actually, I do have a problem with it in many cases, especially when it's replacing what could be actual discussion, but that's not what's going on here, so it's beside the point). It's the argument in this post that bothers me, and that's what I'm trying to address here.
that sounds about right!
I don't see how you got that summary. Benjamin Todd was not looking to start a vague discussion. He was looking to gather questions important to people trying to make a difference so that people 80K could research well thought out answers to those questions. This is a simple but important step in guiding ongoing research to focus on answering questions that matter, and we should not expect great depth in the presentation of this step. The in-depth, well written articles may come after questions have been gathered. If you want to see what they have written on research they have already done, look around on their site.
So, the way I would summarise is:
I hope you will give it another look, and try to judge it not as a polished stand alone contribution, which it is not trying to be, but as an important step in a process that produces a valuable contribution.
(And though I swamped with many projects, I will see if I can write the article you are looking for, or find the right person to write it.)