(This comment is entirely about the meta-subject and your approach to this discussion, and doesn't engage with your dialogue with TheOtherDave.)

I can't respond anymore to threads! you guys win! crush dissent based on superficial factors that "automatically result in downvotes" and thus ignore criticism! fool proof!

This is, in local parlance, called a Fully General Counterargument. It does not engage with the arguments we present at all, does not present any evidence that its claim might be true, but applies optimized sophistry to convince an audience that its claim is true and the alternatives untrue.

The response blocker is an anti-troll functionality, and does more good than harm to the epistemic hygiene of the community (as far as I can tell).

Dissent is not crushed - if the community norms are respected, even very contrarian arguments can be massively upvoted. However, this usually requires more research, evidence and justification than non-contrarian arguments, because according to the knowledge we have an opinion that disagrees with us starts with a lower credibility prior, and this prior needs more evidence to be brought up to the same level of credibility as other arguments that the community is neutral or positive about.

We¹ understand that it can be frustrating to someone who really wants to discuss and is interested to be blocked off like this, but this also seems to double-time as a filter for new users. New users that cannot muster the patience to deal with this issue are very unlikely to be mature and respectful enough to participate productively on LessWrong, since many of the relevant behaviors do correlate.

The best way "around" the block that prevents you from responding to comments is to PM users directly, and if something you want to say is of public interest it is usually recommended to ask a more neutral participant of the discussion or someone you believe will represent and transmit your message well to post what you have to say for you. Some users have even experimented a bit with this in the past and shown that changing the username that posts something does change the way even LW users will read and interpret the content (there are many reasons why this is not always a bad thing).

Overall, when you want to criticize LW ideas, we expect you to have thought about it a reasonably large amount of time (proportionally to how much others on LW have already thought about it), we expect some evidence to be presented because if most LWers don't believe the claim this is bayesian evidence that it is not worth believing, and we expect you to use terms and concepts that are close to the ones we use or present evidence that the words and concepts we use for something are not adequate and you have more appropriate suggestions.

However, as it is, your criticism doesn't seem to offer any evidence-based claims, your questions seem poorly defined and tainted with confusion, your attitude is providing strong evidence that you are not willing to update to evidence or engage in any sort of rational and useful discourse, and I had great difficulty writing my previous response because I was attempting to meet you as close as possible to your concepts and terminology rather than start from the LessWrong common ground and local jargon, since it seemed unlikely that simply phrasing it in my own standard words would have fared any better than what I assume you've already read.

1. For as much of LessWrong as I can speak for, which is probably not much - I'm a relatively recent user and I have made no major contributions that I'm aware of. This applies to each time I use "we" in this comment.