Viliam_Bur comments on The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice - Less Wrong
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The example by David Stove gave me shivers. I only wish it was shorter -- not fewer examples, but shorter author's comments between them.
This discussion is about hand washing, but now I think more about vaccination. I feel like reading Stove's article vaccinated me against most of philosophy.
A good epistemic practice might be courage to say "this is nonsense" or "this is insane" when reading a thoughtless flow of words. Perhaps the karma system of LW should include a reason why someone voted text up or down. Reasons for upvote could be like "interesting", "well referenced" etc., reasons for downvote could be like "useless", "offensive" or "insane".
If some text does not make sense, members of rational community should have courage to say "this does not make sense to me". (People usually don't do this, because they fear it will make them appear stupid.) It is always a useful signal... at best it means that author should communicate more clearly, at worst it means that author wrote nonsense.
Suggested implementation: Clicking upvote or downvote could make a tiny textbox next to the thumb appear where you can (but are NOT obliged to) type a maximum of 15 letters, explaining the vote in one word.
Reasons for upvotes appear in tiny green letters, reasons for downvotes appear in tiny red letters. Identical words are not repeated but a +<number of times mentioned> can appear next to them.
That doctor would probably want to replace my broken parts with functional parts, rather than treat my diseases. The horror.
Just a very few of the labels used on this site are passwords I am thinking of, labels of the very few ways the forty are wrong. The resources enabling one to see underlying problems among the forty are on this website. However, it is better not to simply declare: "The problem behind most of them all is X", where X is a label. Someone might believe me!