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Alicorn comments on Preventing discussion from being watered down by an "endless September" user influx. - Less Wrong Discussion

14 Post author: Epiphany 02 September 2012 03:46AM

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Comment author: Alicorn 02 September 2012 05:18:11PM 2 points [-]

Doesn't the downvoting minimize this problem?

No, not really. They say things like "hahahaha, sure, downvote me more, that only proves me right, you're unable to actually address my arguments!" And then people try to address their arguments and get nowhere. It's a remarkably consistent type, actually. This problem is one of the things the controversial new trollfeeding tax is meant to handle.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 September 2012 01:01:08AM 1 point [-]

No, not really. They say things like "hahahaha, sure, downvote me more, that only proves me right, you're unable to actually address my arguments!" And then people try to address their arguments and get nowhere. It's a remarkably consistent type, actually.

Spot on. And bizarrely enough there even seems to be a remarkable correlation in the kind of positions this type supports. Something along the lines of an "Incorrect Metacontrarian Cluster".

Comment author: gwern 03 September 2012 02:47:37AM 1 point [-]

http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/LskyetalPsychScienceinPressClimateConspiracy.pdf seems relevant:

We report a survey (N >1100) of climate blog users to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science. Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r .80 between latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists.

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