(Or maybe my downvotes are just because I have again failed to come up with a civil-sounding way to express discomfort with an interlocutor's tone? Is there any way to do that at all, or are my choices radio silence v. painstakingly refraining from reacting to the tone for an entire conversation? Someone please tell me.)
I think it might be more specific than lack of civility alone. I'm not sure that lack of civility is always a problem. Sometimes the interlocutor has it coming. But this:
I have quashed the impulse to downvote and then ignore you, [...]
sounds... haughty? Condescending? Something along those lines.
You could try being more like "I'm annoyed at you in a thoroughly egalitarian manner" rather than "Your comment indicates that you are an insect beneath my notice" (that is my gut reaction to your comment, not a claim about intended meaning).
Can you come up with a sample script of what you're talking about? It sounds like a plausibly right explanation and my brain generates words that it thinks conform to the theory appropriately, but I appear to be really bad at being annoyed at people on LW without getting downvoted so I am trying to err on the side of asking for more help.
I have decided that it would be valuable for me to read books (blog posts, articles, random conversations between smart people who store chatlogs) about introspection, take notes, and try to distill and clarify the information. This could result in me eventually giving up, or in a Luminosity Sequence: Second Edition (Now With Literature, Part Of This Complete Breakfast!), or (optimism!) me being able to sort ~90% of people into some number of categories such that their category membership tells me how to help them develop luminosity superpowers in N simple steps with exercises/therapy-ish stuff/etc.
Help me eat luminosity! I need recommendations for stuff to read. This stuff should be:
I read really fast. Don't worry about oversaturating me with recommendations, but please do say a little about why you recommend a thing (even if it's "I haven't read this, but I keep hearing about it, so I guess some people like it") and post recommendations in separate comments so people with information about the item can vote up and down separately. Recommendations for non-written things will be heavily discounted but not outright disqualified.
I would also like a supply of guinea-pigs-in-waiting for if and when I get to the point of trying the sorting or the superpower-giving part of the optimistic end state of the project.
If people want me to, I can document the process of luminosity-eating so there is a template to follow for other subject-eating projects, but I wouldn't do this by default because in general I only do things that someone would care if I didn't do them.