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ialdabaoth comments on Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace? - Less Wrong
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As a separate follow-up to this question, I went ahead and looked at Eugine's posts for the past few weeks. It looks like EVERYTHING he's posting is getting downvoted, even comments that are straightforward and reasonable.
...
Come on, guys. Where does this end?
Let's examine consequential goals, here:
If your goal is to stop Eugine Nier from having enough karma to downvote people, you don't have to destroy everything he posts - and doing so is especially problematic, given that he sometimes has reasonably insightful things to say. You can solve this problem by simply downvoting him when he's being deliberately contentious, and downvoting him when he's quote-mining. When he has something actually worth listening to, upvote it (or at the very least, don't downvote it).
If your goal is to send him a message, then downvoting EVERYTHING just sends the message "be more powerful and you win", whereas downvoting only those posts relating to politics/social issues sends a more nuanced message.
If your goal is to signal to the administrators that the karma system is broken, then JUST block-downvoting Eugine won't do that; we need to turn the whole site into a ridiculous mess. (Tongue-in-cheek suggestion that I am TOTALLY NOT ADVOCATING: Destroying Eleizer's karma instead would send a much tighter message).
Finally, if you're doing ANY of this for my sake, I would humbly request that when you downvote someone, you have a legitimate reason for downvoting that post beyond merely the name of the poster, AND that you either reply or send them a PM explaining why you downvoted them, and what they could do to improve their post quality. It doesn't have to be on every post, but I really think that if we start helping each other improve instead of simply punishing failure, this site's general social atmosphere could be greatly improved.
Quick question: Why do you think Eugine_Nier is the person who is doing this?
Edit: Retracted, found it elsewhere in the thread.
I haven't been downvoting Eugine lately, nor am I downvoting anyone for your sake, but I will restate my position here that wanting less of a particular user's contributions is a legitimate reason to downvote that user's contributions, regardless of the particular content of a specific comment.
For my own part, I usually make it a practice not to downvote people I'm engaged in discussion with.
Conversely, when I reach a point where I notice a comment, feel like I should reply to explain my objections to it, then turn off the antikibbitzer, recognize the user's name, and decide I just can't be bothered talking to them further because previous attempts have been so unproductive... I downvote, without further comment.
While I in theory agree with this, I wouldn't want to see this become common in practice. The problem is, you don't need that many users to karmassassinate someone completely. That makes the process potentially really nondemocratic and noisy. You could say that other users could correct for abusive downvoting by upvoting, but I doubt this actually happens enough.
Yes, I agree completely that if the majority of the site isn't good about upvoting what they do want, then a few people who downvote everything (and everyone) they don't want get to exert preference-implementing power far out of proportion to their numbers, and if the preferences of those people are bad for the site, then the result is bad for the site.
And I agree that this is likely the case in reality.
But in pointing that out, you're invoking a much bigger issue than the one we started out discussing, because this isn't just a problem with downvoting all comments for a given user (aka "karmassassination").
It's a problem with downvoting all comments that support or oppose a given political platform, or all comments that support or oppose a given philosophical position, or all comments that display or fail to display a given rhetorical style, or any category of comments.
It's most obvious when the category is a user, because user's can complain of abuse and our social instinct is to defend other people from abuse we consider unjustified. (An instinct and a practice I endorse.) We don't have that instinct to defend political platforms or philosophical positions or rhetorical styles, so when users exert the same degree of power to implement their (potentially site-damaging) preferences about those things, we mostly don't notice or care, and we don't come up with catchy words for it.
In any case... regardless of the scope of the issue, the question at hand is how best to address it.
You seem to be advocating addressing this by establishing a social norm of not exerting power, and treating the few people who do as norm-violators who should cool it down and be less pushy about implementing our preferences. (At least when it comes to users... perhaps you are OK with exerting that power for other categories of comments.)
I advocate instead a social norm of exerting that power, and treating the many people who don't as norm-violators who should step it up and be less lazy about implementing our preferences.
Finding and categorizing comments by user is a lot easier than finding them by political or philosophical position. I think that's more relevant than social instincts in this case.
I think you're advocating a very time intensive approach to voting behaviour. Power would concentrate in the hands of the few who have time to plow through every relevant comment in case they come across a user or an opinion that might violate their preferences. Do you have good reasons to expect these kinds of users would protect your preferences?
If what you're advocating becomes the norm, how is a user supposed to know why he was downvoted/upvoted and change/continue their behaviour? Even with the current voting volume, few explanations for votes are given.
Or it would diffuse among the many who vote according to their preferences on whatever comments they happen to notice.
Nope, in either case. I doubt my preferences align particularly well with the "coherent volition" of LW as a whole.
I agree that this is a problem.
If silence becomes the norm, this problem is not ameliorated.
Downvotes and upvotes are in general a poor mechanism for communicating that sort of detailed information, they just provide a sense over time a sense of what kinds of things get downvoted... more by looking at the downvoting of other users than by looking at the downvoting of our own comments, in practice, because there are so many more other users than there are usses.
But they're what we have, and they are better than silence.
True.
I doubt that. Many people here have long comment histories. You don't simply happen to notice most old comments, but if you're so inclined and have the time, clickfest awaits.
Silence already is the norm. "By the way I downvoted all your comments because of X." How do you expect that to go?
What amount of bad comments would be a reasonable threshold for downvoting someone's every comment? 50 percent? 20 percent? Should there be guidelines for that?
My own standard for downvoting a user as a category is "Would Less Wrong be better off if this user went away?" It's possible that there's some threshold percentage that causes me to arrive at that judgement, but if so, I don't know what that threshold is.
My suggested guideline is: if LessWrong would be better off if user X went away, downvote user X's comments.
Sure, that's true. And I certainly agree that it's easier to retroactively downvote all of a single user's comments than it is to retroactively downvote all the comments in various other categories. It is consequently true that if downvoting all the comments in a category I want less of is a bad thing, doing so for the category "user X's comments" is particularly bad because it's both bad and easy.
Sorry, I was unclear. By "silence" I don't mean the absence of English sentences, I mean the absence of signal.
To rephrase... if failing to downvote comments in a category that's of negative value to the site becomes (or remains) the norm, it becomes (remains) true that users won't know that they should change their behaviour. (Corresponding things are true of failing to upvote comments in a positive-value category.)
If that norm is replaced by up/downvoting such comments as I advocate, you're right that the user doesn't suddenly become aware of what the problem/benefit is. But they weren't aware of that information before implementing that norm-replacement, either.
Looked at the other way: if our goal is to maximize the amount of information people get about what's wrong (or right) with their comments, discussing how we ought to be using the karma system is a waste of time, because karma is a deeply flawed mechanism for achieving that goal.
If all your comments are downvoted because someone deemed that 20% of them are damaging, it's much more difficult to deduce why that happened than if voting happens per comment.
If you take into account how lazy people are explaining themselves, it might still be a pretty good mechanism for that purpose, certainly better than nothing.
Yes, that's true.
I certainly agree that karma is better than nothing, and I suppose it's possible that it represents an optimal means for getting information from people too lazy to provide information by other means.
I'm curious about this. Why would you want less of a particular user's contributions, if not for the content of those contributions?
I might downvote comment C1 by user U1 because of my understanding of C1 informed by the context established by U1's contributions taken as a whole, even if an identical comment C2 by user U2 would instead cause me to reply to C2, or just ignore it.
More generally, individual comments aren't events in isolation, and I don't necessarily respond to them as if they were.
Hypothetical cause: someone could think that some comments are so damaging that the community (or some other larger group) will be better served if the person is discouraged in general, even if that means downvoting their actually good comments.
Damage is another Trojan horse for hiding confirmation bias.
In such cases, do you believe that people can change? Or is it more likely that once someone has made such a damaging comment, that they need to be written off forever?
I'm not sure I believe that such a category reasonably exists, but it is the closest justification I can imagine that would plausibly make sense in this context.
Wanting less of isn't a good reason in itself: it depends on why you want less of.
If some fictitious person, resembling none here, were to be on the receiving end of a polite and competently argued rebuttal of a belief they hold dear, they would probably not want to hear it. But that is their confirmation bias talking. A rationalist website should judge by rational criteria, not emotional ones.
If we disapprove of what some fictitious person wants in the first place (such as, in your fictitious example, wanting to not hear polite and competently argued rebuttals of beliefs they hold dear), objecting to their choice of tactic is misleading.
Our objection in that fictitious case is to the person's values, not to their tactics, and I encourage us to say so clearly should that hypothetical situation ever arise.
The objection is to using "do not want to hear" as a criterion for downvotting, as a matter of board policy, not as an individual tactic. If posters were encouraged to think about how well argued and factual posts are instead observing which way their knees jerked, they would be practicing rationality as they go along, to name but one missed opportunity.
I endorse "downvote what you want less of" as a matter of board policy.
If individuals want less of things they ought to want more of, I endorse opposing the incorrect values of those individuals.
Those are two separate claims, and I oppose entangling them into a single claim, and also oppose further entangling them with "yay rationality! boo bias!" cheerleading.
Downvoted per your request.
Oh good grief! Opposition to bias is a bias ... and transparent is a colour.
I agree with what seems to be your point that opposition to bias isn't a bias.
I have no idea how it connects to anything I said.
Yay rationality, boo bias.
Yes, I (implicitly) described you as cheerleading for that stance.
And I oppose entangling such cheerleading with making substantive claims, as I said.
What does that have to do with opposition to bias not being a bias?
(Which, again, I agree that it isn't, I'm just not following your point. If you're not interested in explaining yourself further, that's fine too, we can drop it here.)