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ialdabaoth comments on You can't signal to rubes - Less Wrong
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No, the motive of the behavior is "signal to a particular target audience of superiors that one is effective at leadership despite in fact not being effective at leadership. The specific signal that is interpreted as effective leadership happens to be dominance over subordinates, therefore someone who wishes to signal effective leadership will dominate their subordinates."
It's telling that our culture so intertwines the two (effective leadership and dominance over subordinates) that no one even remembers that the actual trait we're trying to signal is "effective leadership"; the mistake that everyone seems to keep making is that dominating subordinates is itself the desired trait.
Note that my replies were to the unedited version and would not make sense as reply to the current claim.
I don't believe the premised claim that active attempts to signal effective leadership are the predominate motive or cause of dominance of subordinates.
But it was the original premise of the quoted post that Patrick was objecting to, so whether we believe that premise or not is immaterial. This discussion is about whether the word "signaling" was used correctly in that post, not about whether that post was factually correct. A discussion about whether the predominate motive for dominating subordinates is to signal effective leadership would be interesting, but seems like a bit of a distraction when we're trying to have a discussion about semantics and word choice.
I appear to be confused - I don't understand why the previous post was downvoted. What am I saying that is incorrect or inappropriate?
I wouldn't worry about a single downvote or two.
That said, while I didn't downvote (or, indeed, previously read) the comment, I would say that discussions purely about semantics and word choice are rarely worth the energy to have.
Well, now everything I've said over the past few days has been downvoted.
Am I not the right sort of person to be posting on lesswrong?
It's generally a better idea to criticize actions rather than people: question your actions before you question yourself (the latter leads to a mindset which is more resistant to changing actions). But in any case, the most likely hypothesis, given that many of your posts have only one downvote, is that someone is serially downvoting you.
You've done nothing wrong (that I've seen), either someone is misusing the downvote as a retaliation tactic or LW is just bad at voting (or both). I've been there. It clearly hasn't affected you over a long period of time, since your karma is in the positive hundreds (as opposed to mine, which hasn't hit the 20 shreshold). But to be sure, try to avoid dubious assertions/axioms (or if you have to use one, affix the phrase "according to my beliefs" or something similar).
By my reasoning (or more accurately, by the reasoning of my inner Death Eater), if someone is serially downvoting me as a retaliation tactic, then that means I've done something wrong (or more accurately, that I'm BEING something wrong).
No one post you've said (regardless of how bad it could've been) would ever justify downvoting everything in retaliation, because that's not what the downvote is meant to be used for. I can understand why you, as a rationalist, place doubt upon yourself by default, but there's no need to defend your (theoretical) aggressor. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism, some die by moderation.
Yes, but what I'm saying is, I think that the retaliatory downvoting is an indication that I'm one of the weeds. (I'm used to this from other fora, so it's not unreasonable to assume that I'm a weed here, too.)