Open Thread for January 17 - 23 2014

niceguyanon

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

This one (which you explained well)

This one sat at -2 for awhile; I was confused by that.

This one also sat at -2 for quite awhile, but seems to have come up recently.

...huh. On the whole, most of the severely-downvoted posts that I remember being confused about, have since been upvoted to low-positives. I had no idea. Thank you for prompting me to take the time and attention to notice that.

I guess, then, a more direct question I have is "how do I bring my karma into the 90%'s, instead of the low 70%'s where it is now?" - I've always felt that percentages are a better measure of my worth to the community than numbers. (Alternatively, if this is an incorrect assumption, then how do I update so that I see the percentages as not that important?)

Dude, this is not worth stressing about. Write what you want and let people react how they will. Many of Eliezer's posts are heavily downvoted.

3votesplainer12y

In many of your comments you seem to advocate an overly pessimistic view of humanity and portray people as unusually selfish or sadistic. Single instances of such comments might not get downvoted, but once there are enough of them to make a pattern, this might evoke a stronger reaction and even oversensitivity to such a pattern causing innocent comments to get the punishment. I haven't downvoted such comments, but don't want to see them either. This feels like a matter of mental hygiene. In some of your comments you're introducing negative bias that takes unnecessary cognitive work to counter and I think you know which comments I'm talking about. From your previous comments I infer you're aware of this bias, or at least that other people consistently view it as such. It seems to me this bias is specific to certain topics, so if you don't know how to counter it yourself, it might be better to avoid these topics as much as possible. Even if you think your ideas of some aspects of human psychology are accurate, you might want to reconsider your prospects of making people conform to them here in light of accumulating evidence, and pursue more fruitful and noncontroversial discussion.

3ChristianKl12y

I think it also got downvoted for promoting bad behavior. [...] You speak about observing bad people winning in a direct way. That's something for which some folks on LW vote you down. On the other hand your post isn't insightful in a way where the people who enjoy analysing the dark arts of social interaction will upvote your post in significant amounts. If popularity is your goal that you might want to avoid posts that advocate that bad social behavior pays off. If you still want to write those posts, go more into theoretical depth or quote statistics but even then the post probably doesn't reach a >90% approval rate.