I've never had the opportunity to respond to a single comment with both of these, but if you haven't yet, you should check out Well-kept gardens die of pacifism and Why our kind can't cooperate. (the latter is less directly relevant)
If anything, there should be less rudeness and more downvoting on this site. For this community, rude disagreement and lack of downvoting would still be the default if we weren't actively suppressing it.
Politeness is useful. Rudeness is the way to mind-killing. If you don't want people to engage with your ideas rationally, be rude to them - that strategy works very well on humans.
Rudeness makes sense insofar as agents respond irrationally to claims that are addressed at them, I understand that claim although I wish it wasn't true and I still prefer frankness to politeness, and I still don't trust calls to "be polite".
Additionally, I want a way to express frustration when I'm dealing with stupid things.
But most of the downvoting on this site seems to be a death spiral or a happy spiral. There are a disproportionate number of comments with +10 or -5 karma on this site, some of EY's comments get like +50 which isn't justified no matter how good the comment. That's like the worth of an entire well done article. Why more downvoting?
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: