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Discussion of "What are your contrarian views?"
I'd like to use this thread to review the "What are your contrarian views?" thread as the meta discussion there was drowned out by the intended content I feel. What can be done better with the voting system? Should threads like these be a regular occurence? What have you specifically learned from that thread? Did you like it at all?
Usual voting rules apply.
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Comments (19)
I think that the interesting part of these things is the actual posts and the responses to them, not the votes. I think it should work more similarly to CMV (Change My View) on Reddit. Have a thread (maybe just the open thread) where people are encouraged to post where the say something that the expect many people on Lesswrong might disagree with, and people try to convince them.
I also think that the value of the votes is much better if there are upvotes and downvotes. Unfortunately this could be bad for karma. Perhaps each post should have a poll in it, and people upvote just based on how interesting the conversation is.
I also think there was a problem with people posting underspecified claims. Words like "feminism" and "can" have many sometimes contradictory definitions.
I like the suggestion of using a poll, but that is even harder on the poster than adding the special notice. Also: The karma-incentive on contrarian ideas is beneficial.
Disagree, I think the main benefit of the thread is defeating Asch Conformity type effects. Hence the voting system is useful.
I am puzzled by the downvote on Azathoth123's comment here. I think it's not the only mysterious downvote I've seen on his comments recently. If this is because someone who doesn't like his opinions on race and sex and suchlike thinks he should be punished for it: Please stop; you will not do anyone any good this way.
I guess this kind of thing is why we try to avoid talking about that stuff on Less Wrong.
Maybe. But another possibility is that this kind of thing is because we try to avoid talking about that stuff on Less Wrong. In other words, that it's not that some politically motivated people are punishing others for having Incorrect Views -- but that someone who thinks LW is an inappropriate venue for discussions involving race and gender and so forth is hitting everyone involved with punitive downvotes in the hope of making them shut up.
It would be particularly ironic if it turned out that (1) this is happening and (2) the motivation is to try to make LW a more reasonable and less angry place and (3) the actual effect is simply to make more people on LW feel attacked cross, which will doubtless tend to make them less reasonable and more angry.
(Some weak evidence for this hypothesis -- I mean just #1, not the further elaborations #2 and #3 -- is that I'm seeing what look like obviously unreasonable downvotes aimed at (at least) both me and Azathoth123, and I think we've been the most active participants in the recent discussion of (alleged) sexist bias. ChristianKI has also been a frequent participant and has also had a bunch of downvotes, but I happen not to have noticed any as obviously unreasonable as some of the ones Azathoth123 and I have received so I can't rule out the possibility that he came by his downvotes honestly, so to speak. I should perhaps mention for the avoidance of doubt that whoever's throwing a lot of gratuitous downvotes at Azathoth123, it isn't me. I downvote rather little on LW and in the recent sexism discussions I think I have downvoted one comment. It might possibly be two.)
I don't know about advancing the mission, but I had a lot of fun reading it. It also is a good barometer of what is or isn't contrarian. I wasn't the only one who had a view I thought was contrarian but ended up being pretty normal.
Also, is there a way to redeem karma for money or something? I like learning people's opinions of my views but -worrying- about losing points seems wrong.
Personally I avoided voting on top-level posts at all in the last thread because I think the system is confusing. As some others pointed out there I'd rather upvote interesting posts (in the context of being a thread about unusual ideas) rather than the ones I disagree with.
I tried to avoid voting on anything, because I couldn't decide how to handle the non-top-level comments. When people go beyond baldly asserting things, and start having actual debates in subthreads, things get muddy.
I think you're supposed to vote non-top-level comments the regular way.
I asked someone on there to explain two of the views they listed. They declined, because they lost points from another one they explained.
I wonder if it's due to people just following the recent comments and not realizing it's on that thread.
I did it, first because I thought the special rules about voting only applied to top-level comments, and second because there's a difference between contrarian views and Usenet-grade crackpottery.
I believe they do.
They lost points because they weren't rational. The top level post says you should post ideas that you believe that others do not, but I think that implicit in that is that you should post ideas that are reasonably well thought out and supported. His weren't.
(As a practical matter, ideas that are not only contrary but which correspond either to 1) common misunderstandings, or 2) common crackpot claims are rarely if ever well thought out and supported. Why this is so is another question.)
I actually made a good faith attempt to explain special relativity to him, it was when he shifted from "confused physics student mode" to "crackpot mode" that I gave up and started downvoting.
People won't vote posts to the negatives and being karmaslapped by being the majority opionion feels weird.
Posts that got a lot of upvotes and downvotes appear very same as ignored posts. A 50%/50% splitter woudl appear perfectly neutral.
Try hovering over the point total, and it'll show the positive votes ratio. It's not perfect, but it helps.
The fundamental rule of the post was "Upvote anything you do not agree with." This is an unintuitive action. Unfortunately, that instruction was buried in the middle of the introductory paragraph. With a discussion title like this one, people want to jump straight into the fray, so they may disregard the text entirely. As such, I'd argue that we needed a formatting tweak:
Write the rule on its own line. Make it bold.
Also, if you're worried about substantive conversation overtaking meta-conversation, add a "Don't ask why" rule (although that will be fairly unpopular). Many of the contrarian views are flatly and completely against the site's majority. Opening a thread on why that's the case just turns that comment thread into a shooting match of everyone against the commenter.