Similar ideas have been posted before.

Do you think there would be interest in an "Irrationality Quotes" Thread?

To be honest, these threads are full of such great information that I can't help imagining putting something absolutely useless or ridiculous in it. I just can't resist how it would look to be scrolling through such properly-formatted and thoughtful knowledge from reputable people and then come across, just as perfectly-formatted, presented totally seriously...something like "Some dogs can't resist a tasty morsel of feces." -Theresa A. Fuess. (http://vetmed.illinois.edu/petcolumns/petcols_article_page.php?PETCOLID=77&URL=0) ...just tucked in perfectly normally with everything else.

Or, more appropriately for its own thread, quotes that demonstrate the exact opposite of what LessWrong represents, as a means of reminding people of the various forms that irrationality takes when presented by serious opposition.

I'll give it a go.

"The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible." -Freeman Dyson

"One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide." -Saul Alinsky

This doesn't work in practice precisely because mass and retributive downvoting are disproportionately effective. [...] So they won't average out properly.

See the next sentence of my comment.

Even if the "downvote below threshold" might incite curiosity, the person in question still loses privileges on site.

That's a very different case. Downvoting a person into losing privileges can by done by a single user if the target's posted a lot of marginal or controversial comments, but unless they're very new it takes a lot of patience or a downvote script (Eugine seems to have been using patience), and AFAICT most people have karma ratios high enough that it'd take sockpuppets or other abuses that could be targeted by narrower rules. I only know of one illegitimate case, although others may emerge as the consequences of Eugine's behavior become more apparent. Conversely, downvoting a post below the visibility threshold is much more common but can't be done by a single user.

On Facebook, you can't stop OTHER people from seeing what the person has to say, no matter how much you scream at them. With the system here, you can.

Can't you? Eliezer cites the easiness of clicking a button and making the other person Go Away as a major perceived advantage of posting on FB rather than LW. And even if you downvote someone on LW, well, someone can undo that with an upvote.

Sorry, didn't see this until now. In future, it works better if you put responses to a post under that post; I'm not alerted if you respond to me in another branch of the thread.

Secondly, when you refer to (I presume) LessWrong as "an ideologically-mixed environment that values things other than conformity," you're assuming that everyone here views it that way. If everyone saw the downvote button in the same idealized form, we wouldn't have a problem.

I'm presuming no such thing; I was talking about the composition of LW, not the purpose of the downvote button. People's personal downvote policies are going to vary (quite a bit, really), but as long as the forum as a whole contains people with a mix of values similar to those I mentioned, their votes are going to average out to something like the behavior I described: some votes for conformity, some for contrarianism, some for unrelated norms. Note however that this doesn't take into account retributive downvoting; there needs to be policy in place to deal with that, but hey! Now there is, and we've just seen it in action.

The visibility effects of karma, I suspect, are overrated as a driver of behavior except in the case of top-level posts (where they're taken off most of the interface and become something of a pain to get to): leaving that "downvoted below threshold" notification seems to incite people's curiosity as much as anything. Some of my highest-ranked posts are replies to comments below the threshold; they wouldn't have gotten there if people weren't reading the thread.

The karma toll for replying to heavily downvoted comments does shape behavior, but I've only seen one person get that low for politely expressing political views, and he was a white supremacist.

Eugine_Nier was exactly who I was referring to in the other thread about mass downvoting when I said I had noticed certain members who had a long string of "-1" votes on comments they were replying to and with which they disagreed.

I think he was a perfect example of the flaw in the karma system, but to see him investigated and removed for this behavior is very encouraging.

I have a folder with various document files on my various theories and work. I used to go with the earliest ideas at the top and then work downward. Now I've reversed that and have the newest ideas at the top, so I start out looking at the latest things. I bold the main concept that made me want to write that thing down, so I can skim the file easily, and then under that use hyphens with each thought or longer statement relating to it. So a typical entry looks something like this. (for some reason I can't do hard returns so...it actually wouldn't look like this at all.)

Ted Williams called his book "The Science of Hitting." -This type of phrase might be good if we want to collect this as a book. -We can go to wikipedia later and see how the book was received.

If I have a breakthrough, I put it in red, and if I quote something or have something interesting, it's in italics.

Poker is an excellent teaching vehicle. It really motivates to learn about probabilities, because it makes you win. It teaches you the emotional strength to accept sunk costs, because it reduces your unavoidable losses.