Every now and then, I write an LW comment on some topic and feel that the contents of my comment pretty much settles the issue decisively. Instead, the comment seems to get ignored entirely - it either gets very few votes or none, nobody responds to it, and the discussion generally continues as if it had never been posted.
Similarly, every now and then I see somebody else make a post or comment that they clearly feel is decisive, but which doesn't seem very interesting to me. Either it seems to be saying something obvious, or I don't get its connection to the topic at hand in the first place.
This seems like it would be about inferential distance: either the writer doesn't know the things that make the reader experience the comment as uninteresting, or the reader doesn't know the things that make the writer experience the comment as interesting. So there's inferential silence - a sufficiently long inferential distance that a claim doesn't provoke even objections, just uncomprehending or indifferent silence.
But "explain your reasoning in more detail" doesn't seem like it would help with the issue. For one, we often don't know beforehand when people don't share our assumptions. Also, some of the comments or posts that seem to encounter this kind of a fate are already relatively long. For example, Wei Dai wondered why MIRI-affiliated people don't often respond to his posts that raise criticisms, and I essentially replied that I found the content of his post relatively obvious so didn't have much to say.
Perhaps people could more often explicitly comment if they notice that something that a poster seems to consider a big thing doesn't seem very interesting or meaningful to them, and briefly explain why? Even a sentence or two might be helpful for the original poster.
I managed to bake these thoughts:
There are three things worth upvoting:
There's no way for me to upvote the discussion resulting from a comment without upvoting the root comment or the author of that command. Given those two side-effects don't seem important to me, I've opted to upvote comments in which interesting discussions have occurred, though I'm not honestly sure sorting by leading doesn't already serve that purpose. Honestly, I sort by new. If I'm going to participate, I might as well read all the comments to see if what I want to say had already been said. I have severe doubts that a "karma" system ultimately makes sense for anything other than articles. If titles and feedback meant nothing, we could as well list only the author and karma of articles in the index. We could get rid of date too, for that matter.
Now that I think about it, I can't remember the names of half the authors who have written posts I've updated. I'd like to dream up a system to help me track authors who tend to write comments I personally consider worth reading, but then I'm going to end up reading all the comments if I am to participate, regardless of "quality."
But then again, as per my comments in A game of angels and devil, maybe I'm focusing on higher-order abstract qualities of discussion when the majority of readers simply need to be beaten into epistemic submission. Am I the only one that had already well-understood, independently formalized, and completely internalized a supermajority of articles on LessWrong prior to even discovering the site? Honestly, I'd like to wait and see, but there's been plenty of time already. The fix is in for this moment in the system's evolution: This article was an abysmal failure. I'm about ready to try to collect the names of the individuals worth the effort of continued discussion with and create a safe haven away from the mass all too willing to divide itself out of the picture.
If there already exists such a cabal, it has done an abysmal job of improving matters here. I hope my recognition of the epistemic arrogance of others isn't itself mistaken for epistemic arrogance, but if such a cabal were at all worthy of being inducted in to, they would already have more than enough epistemic humility to recognize that. I guess the fix is already in on that, too: This entire cluster of organizations and individuals is failing to accomplish its own goals. I can already model the paranoia of any existing cabals here. I guess if I'm the least paranoid among those capable, I really don't have any solution other than to keep lurking the IRC and grabbing up the individuals that exhibit the readily detectable qualities necessary. Hint hint. Hint. IRC. Hint.
I can't wait until my cabal has enough members to actively search. ~_~