I downvoted your comment, and here is why.

Less Wrong is, compared to the rest of the internet, extremely troll-free. But they still show up, you see, and when they do, the only acceptable response is to vote down. Not to reply, just to vote down.

Not every comment is worth seeing. Those that aren't worth seeing definitely need to be downvoted. But that's not the only reason to downvote a comment.

I downvote when:

• a comment is just a joke and is not a gutbuster (inappropriate for Less Wrong)
• someone on the losing side of an argument isn't even trying to update his beliefs
• a comment not an attempt at new insight (can be either useless praise or useless contradiction)
• a user is posting for the sake of karma
• a comment is employing false premises (as yours is just now)
• a comment is annoying (you again)

I hope I helped, and I hope you, when downvoted in the future, think about why first before asking for an explanation. It happens to everyone, and there's a good reason it happens to everyone: nobody makes good comments every single time he says something. Nobody!

I think on Less Wrong there is a very strong tendency to give away karma much too freely, which encourages the act of posting with the partial motivation of gaining karma. Even if it's not often the entire motivation, for that reason I wish that personal karma totals were not readily available information.

One must also be wary of too much pacifism. In that post, Eliezer describes beliefs I've grokked long before ever discovering Less Wrong.

Edit: On second thought, I'm retracting that downvote, because you tried to provide new insight.