Just a short post to highlight an issue with debate on LW; I have recently been involved with some interest in the debate on covid-19 origins on here. User viking_math posted a response which I was keen to respond to, but it is not possible for me to respond to that debate (or any) because the LW site has rate-limited me to one comment per 24 hours because my recent comments are on -5 karma or less.
So, I feel that I should highlight that one side of the debate (my side) is simply not going to be here. I can't prosecute a debate like this.
This is funnily enough an example of brute-force manufactured consensus - there will be a debate, people will make points on their side and the side I am arguing for will be missing, so observers will conclude that there are no valid counterarguments rather than that there are, but they were censored.
I think this is actually quite a good model of how the world has reached the wrong conclusion about various things (which may include covid-19 origins, assuming that covid-19 was actually a lab leak which is not certain). This is perhaps even more interesting than whether covid-19 came from a lab or not - we already knew before 2019 that bioerror was a serious risk. But I feel that we underestimate just how powerful multiple synergistic brute-force consensus mechanisms are at generating an information cascade into the incorrect conclusion.
I'm sure these automated systems were constructed with good intentions, but they do constitute a type of information cascade mechanism - people choose to downvote, so you cannot reply, so it looks like you have no arguments, so people choose to downvote more, etc.
Update: -2 disagree on this. Extremely frustrating to receive anonymous general feedback.
Trying my best here but I get downvotes a lot and often it feels like it's based on the opinion expressed in a comment. I seem to get upvoted a lot when I put pictures of evidence in the comment with simple empirical cites.
Downvoters never reply. I suspect because they are obviously afraid I will retaliate their downvotes with my own...
Your moderators have also disciplined me several times, giving general tips that sometimes I can't find a single message that satisfies their claim. Guess I can't see my own mistakes. It would be really help to have a policy of citing or making some kind of list of the comments that are unsatisfactory and providing it to the user. You also could provide this list before punishing...
If that's too labor intensive, you could expand the reaction system to send a separate notification to the user each time a mod reacts to a users content.
Actually ok now that I am thinking, why don't downvoters have to select the text and provide the negative feedback in order to issue a downvote? Contributing to a temporary ban without feedback is cruel...