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Squark comments on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014 - Less Wrong
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I'd say that even more important than giving explanation is not downvoting merely because you disagree. The signal transmitted by downvoting is "I don't want the hear this" or in simpler language "shut up". This should be reserved to fight content which is offensive, spam, trolling, rampant crackpottery, blatant off-topic etc. Mistakes made in good faith don't deserve a downvote. I'd say it is an extension of the "Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever." rule. The alternative is death spirals, blue-green politics and plainly ruining the community experience for everyone.
I personally made a rule of upvoting any content with net negative score which doesn't deserve a downvote, even if I disagree, especially when it's a comment of a person I'm currently arguing against. I want arguments that are discussions in which both sides are trying to arrive at the truth, not fights or two-people-showing-off-how-smart-they-are (is there a name for it?).
Not if you aim to enforce a level of discussion higher than mere absence of pathology. I like for there to be places that distance themselves from (particular kinds of) mediocrity...
...which is made more difficult by egalitarian instincts.
It's not. Punishment is different enough from deciding who to talk with. See also Yvain on safe spaces.
Downvotes are not the way to achieve it. The way to achieve it is by positive personal example and upvoting content which is exemplary. Why are downvotes bad? Because:
We want to allow "mediocre" people (some of which have an unrealized potential to be excellent) that want to learn from excellent people (I hope you agree). Such people can make innocent mistakes. There's no reason to downvote them as long as they're willing to listen and aren't arrogant in their ignorance. Downvoting will only drive them away.
Even smart people occasionally say foolish things. Downvoting sends such a strong negative signal that it discourages even people that get much more upvotes than downvotes. By "discourages" I don't mean "discourages from saying foolish things", I mean discourages from participating in the community in general.
Most content is not voted upon by most of the community, therefore statistical variance is large. Again, since the discouragement of downvotes is not cancelled out by the encouragement of upvotes, you get much more discouragement than you want.
Downvotes transform arguments into sort of arena fights where the people in the crowd are throwing spoiled vegetables on the players they don't like. The emotional aura this creates is very bad for rationality. It's excellent for blue-green politics (downvote THEM!) and death spirals.
If you don't want to talk to someone, don't upvote her and don't reply to her. The psychological impact of downvoting is equivalent to punishment.
This is completely different. "Safe spaces" are about banning content which might offend someone's sensibilities. My suggestion is about "banning" less content.
I agree with enough of this. I know there are immediate downsides and hypothetical dangers. But the upsides seem indispensable. The argument needs to consider the balance of the two.
They remain in the fabric of the forum, making it less fun to read. Not upvoting doesn't address this issue.
Things that are not fun (for certain sense of "fun") offend my sensibilities (for certain sense of "offend"). My suggestion is to discourage them by downvoting. (This is the intended analogy, which is strong enough to carry over a lot of Yvain's discussion, even if the concept "safe spaces" doesn't apply in detail, although I think it does to a greater extent than I think you think it does.)
I have no problem with that, my problem is with the opposite - people learning from mediocre (or worse) folk, because they don't realize that their content is flawed (which downvotes signal).
IMO on the Light side you learn from something when you can tell it's correct, not when someone tells you it's correct, much less when someone anonymous tells you it's correct.
To some extend yes, but we don't want eternal September either. There concern about the average IQ that reported in the LW census dropping over time.
If we would have less downvotes in general then every single downvote would create a much stronger negative signal than it does at the moment.
Hi Christian, thx for commenting!
I'm not that concerned about average IQ. The crucial questions here are what is the purpose you see in LW and how you envision its future. If you want LW to be an elitist discussion forum for high-IQ people comfortable with a relatively aggressive / competitive environment, then it makes sense for you to use downvotes relatively liberally.
I think that the greatest potential value in LW lies elsewhere. I think LW can become a community and a cultural movement that promotes rationality and humanist values. A movement that has the power to steer history into a direction more of our liking. If you accept this vision, then you should be aiming at a much broader group (while making sure the widening circle doesn't water down our spirit and values). I envision LW as a place where people come to connect to other people that share similar worldview and values, not necessarily all of them being in the top IQ percentile. The "spiritual leadership" of the movement should consist predominantly of highly intelligent people that everyone can learn from, but it is not a necessary requirement for every member.
This effect is only significant for people who spend sufficient time on the forum to get used to the "downvote background". Moreover, I think it is far from strong enough to cancel the reduction in downvotes.
The LessWrong brand is not optimized for reaching a broad public. To the extend that's the goal "effective altruism" is a more effective label under which to operate.
In my view the goal of LessWrong is to provide a forum for debating complex intellectual ideas. Specifically ideas about how to improve human thinking and the FAI problem. Having a good signal-to-noise ratio matters for that purpose.
<blink> Steer history?
When you said "cultural movement", did you really mean "social and political movement" for it is those which steer history?
And what gives you the idea that LW could become massively popular, anyway? There's nothing here particularly interesting for hoi polloi.
What do you mean by "fighting mediocrity"? Should I interpret it literally as "I don't like mediocre people"? Or as "I want to reward excellence"? If it is the latter you are aiming it, use upvotes, not downvotes (for ideal rational agents the two might be symmetric, but for people they aren't: the emotional signal from getting a downvoting is very different from the emotional signal of not getting an upvote).
Exactly, and this is a reason why downvoting is important (and shouldn't be systematically countered): it allows scaring people away (who are not of our tribe). A forum culture that would merely abstain from upvoting is worse at scaring people away than one that actively downvotes.
(Sorry, I heavily edited the grandparent since the first revision.)
The same person who said that also said this, so I guess he meant something narrower by “bullet” than you think.
Upvoted for making an interesting point.
However: I was not appealing to Eliezer's authority. I was just making a parallel with a similar (but more extreme) phenomenon.
Regarding well-kept gardens. Let me put things in perspective. If you see a comment along the lines of "jesus is our lord" or "rationality is wrong because the world is irrational" or "a machine cannot be intelligent because it has no soul", by all means downvote. However, if you see two people debating e.g. whether there will be an AI foom or whether consequentialism is better than deontology or whether AGI will come before WBE, don't downvote someone just because you disagree. Downvote when the argument is so moronic that you're confident you don't want this person in our community.
People change. People change even faster when you give them feedback. I downvote things I don't want to see from people I like and respect the same way I would frown at a friend if they did something I didn't want them to do.
So instead of 'I'm confident I don't want you in our community,' I view a downvote more as 'shape up or ship out.'
Agreed, but...
Nope. Sometimes otherwise-okay people make moronic arguments because they're mind-killed, they're tired, etc.
THE WHOLE POINT OF DOWNVOTES IS TO HAVE LESS BAD STUFF AND MORE GOOD STUFF. This applies not just to making people leave but making people who stay post tbings of higher quality.
If you don't downvote "otherwise-okay" people when they say dumb shit, how are they supposed to learn. Downvote the comment, not the person .
Er... That was my point.
I think the point is that you shouldn't conclude "that you're confident you don't want this person in our community" just because "the argument is so moronic".
(Because there's too much noise with individual arguments to deduce a person's general competence.)
In other words, yes, downvote the comment - not the person.
This is exactly why you shouldn't downvote such comments: they hurt good people and discourage them from participating in the community. Also, consider the possibility your own judgement is affected by tiredness or mind-murder.
I guess you are talking of conditions in which someone makes a downvoting decision. But then underconfidence is also possible, and also a pathology, making one unable to act on a correct judgement. This point might be a reason that The Sin of Underconfidence is a prerequisite for Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.
I agree that both overconfidence and underconfidence is possible, but the potential damage from downvoting is larger than the potential damage from not downvoting. Therefore, let's err on the side of not downvoting.
I think you're drawing a false equivalence here. While a downvote does carry the meaning of "I don't want to hear this", most of the meaning of "shut up" is connotation, not denotation, and those connotations don't necessarily carry over.
Mere disagreement generally isn't enough to justify a downvote, no. But we want to see well-reasoned disagreement: it signifies a chance to teach or to learn, even if it's unpleasant in the moment. On the other hand, there are plenty of things short of Time Cube or cat memes that one might legitimately not want to see here, even if posted in good faith; restricting the option to those most extreme cases robs it of most of its power to improve discussion.
I donwvoted you, because you seem to use upvotes in a way that diminishes the value of the karma system in my eyes - an undeserved downvote is as bad as an undeserved upvote.
I've seen a lot of low quality posts getting some karma, and coming back to positive scores without a good reason - and now I know the behaviour that is partially responsible.
(and the above comes from someone with a mass downvoter after him, who gets a downvote on every single comment he makes)
Downvotes and upvotes are not symmetric, see my reply to Vladimir.
It shouldn't matter why you downvote something, just give an explanation for why you did so. Ideally the same goes for upvotes, where you should explain why you upvoted (if your explanation is any more valuable than "This.").
Trying to define what an upvote or downvote "means" or "shouldn't mean" is futile and beside the point.
No no no no: the beauty of votes is it gives us a very quick and easy way of knowing comment quality without flooding the forum with "good post!" Or countless explanations of things people already know.
Why? What is "the point"? For me, the point is creating a community that is fun, useful and lives up to its ideals of rationality and humanist virtue (whatever the latter means for you, be it utilitarianism, effective altruism etc).
The point is for commenters (and the audience for that matter) not to have to wonder about why they got downvoted/upvoted, in other words for the meaning of that partcular upvote/downvote to be made explicit by the upvoter/downvoter.
And why not? Some introspection does a body good...
...
It would do good to encourage more explaining of upvotes and downvotes. We're not at the point where there's "too much" of it. And, if there was "just the right" amount of it, then we wouldn't be having this discusison.
For a diverse population of people there is no such thing as "just the right amount". Even if you set it at some kind of a central measure (mean, weighted mean, median, etc.), the left tail would complain it's too little and the right tail will complain it's too much.
Speaking personally, most of my downvotes are because the post seemed to me either stupid or dickish. I am not sure LW will gain much if I start posting dick ASCII art as an explanation for downvotes... X-D
Well, if you're adament about it not being systemic, then (if you or someone reading this would be so kind) help me understand my own case, of a few of my comments before this conversation being severely downvoted. I was surprised at the responses, and without any replies, I'm still in the dark. If you could show me the light, then I'd be grateful.
Please provide links as it's hard to see comments at -5 and below. The only strongly downvoted comment of yours that I see itself says "hard downvote for stupendous arrogance" so I'm not sure why are you surprised...
In response to someone wholesale dismissing an entire area of scientific study without having had any experience in it, "stupendous arrogance" is both accurate and tame. I guess "stupendous" kind of sounds like "stupid", but that's probably not why people downvoted the comment.
Is that a terminal goal? Or is it an instrumental goal serving to achieve something else?
Both/neither? It's a reasonable norm and would also help alleviate some personal frustrations. (Sidenote: invoking "Terminal" anything is usually dangerous and unnecessary, c.f. this.)