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Nornagest comments on Group Rationality Diary, January 16-31 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (28)
Let's not pat ourselves on the back too much. Voters here absolutely respond to social cues (albeit unusual ones from the perspective of the wider culture) and to local status; the vote record on a post is not a totally dispassionate estimate of its quality.
That said, pure social awkwardness might limit a post's potential upvotes, but it usually isn't enough to get a post downvoted: that takes obvious bias, factual error, egregiously bad English, a perception of bad faith, or -- exceptionally -- attracting the ire of a serial downvoter. The truly clueless may risk pattern-matching to "bad faith", but that's fairly rare; the rest are more or less orthogonal to social skills.
That was never my intention. I actually initially meant to stress this more, but I cut it as it didn't really fit.
The most important note that it is not necessarily a good thing to ignore social cues. They exist for good reasons. Discourse flows a lot better when it is polite and well presented. Those who ignore that do so at their own peril.
Some do, however. Including us, to some exten. You cannot deny that the population of Less Wrongers is weighted heavily towards the type of people that might be known as nerds, who dismiss the social glue, and prefer more bluntness in their discourse than is usual. Again, this is not necessarily good: See Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate.
In some ways it is good, though: It encourages the virtues of truth-seeking and of not responding to tone, and in general is an attitude that is conductive to the types of things discussed around here. (This is why Less Wrong is neuroatypical in specifically this direction.)