You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Alejandro1 comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: Multiheaded 25 January 2012 05:43PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (857)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Alejandro1 26 January 2012 03:56:01AM 40 points [-]

Bear in mind that some contrarian statements might have been upvoted for being valuable as examples and contributions to the thread, rather than for substantial agreement. Also there is a selection effect: a contrarian sharing an unpopular opinion is very likely to upvote it when seeing a kindred spirit, but a non-contrarian who doesn't share it is unlikely to downvote it (especially in a thread like this one where the point is to encourage contrarian opinions to come out).

Comment author: Polymeron 05 February 2012 06:43:09PM *  10 points [-]

I've up-voted several lists containing statements with which I disagree (some vehemently so), but which were thought provoking or otherwise helpful. So, even if this is just anecdotal evidence, the process you described seems to be happening.