This post is unlikely to be given much attention. And would guess that it is likely to be downvoted. The essential issue is that you gave a as your example of a downvoted comment one of your own comments. That comes across as defensive. It is going to make people less likely to take your point seriously.
As to your specific comment, while I have not downvoted it, I can easily see why someone would downvote it. It seems at the simplest level to misinterpret the parent comment in a fairly trivial fashion.
I don't know if there are issues with people downvoting for bad reasons. I suspect that they exist. But, this is not at all useful evidence for it.
The essential issue is that you gave a as your example of a downvoted comment one of your own comments
Not doing that feels like deception. The downvotes on this comment are the reason I posted the thread. I don't see why people should take me less seriously for being honest.
It seems at the simplest level to misinterpret the parent comment in a fairly trivial fashion.
This is what I am getting at. I think it would be better to say "this is a misinterpretation because ___" rather than downvoting it. I have been thinking about the issue we were talking about there over night and now that I come back to all the downvotes I'm embarrassed to discuss it further. I don't want to talk about it with people who push me away.
this is not at all useful evidence for it.
OK I accept that.
(I'm scared to upvote your comment in case everyone sees it with a positive score and says "Ah we agree with this, let's downvote and ignore this post.")
Not doing that feels like deception. The downvotes on this comment are the reason I posted the thread. I don't see why people should take me less seriously for being honest.
I wouldn't have a problem with you citing it (and I do laud you for being honest) if you would put some effort to find some other posts that you think shouldn't have been downvoted and were.
This is what I am getting at. I think it would be better to say "this is a misinterpretation because _" rather than downvoting it. I have been thinking about the issue we were talking about there over night and now that I come back to all the downvotes I'm embarrassed to discuss it further. I don't want to talk about it with people who push me away.
I agree to a large degree, but would also like to raise the issue of new members/old members here - I think we, as a community should sparingly, if at all, vote down new members, and instead explain our reasoning to them. I know I was very intimidated when I finally stopped lurking, and the fear of being downvoted into oblivion was part of that, sometimes. Downvoting new members discourages their participation, and hinders our goals - it would be far more productive if we can politely and respectfully point out why we think they are wrong.
That being said, there are some users, obviously, who aren't making a faithful attempt at rationality, and it's entirely appropriate to downvote them to oblivion.
I don't see why people should take me less seriously for being honest.
Because humans aren't rational. If you wanted to make an optimal combination of honesty and getting your point listened to you could have found comments that had been downvoted that were not yours that you thought should have been not downvoted. Then you could have given those examples with your own comment and added an explicit disclaimer that although the downvotes to your own comments were what got you thinking of the issue there seemed to be a more general problem as given by those examples.
I don't want to talk about it with people who push me away.
People aren't pushing you away. When comments are at -2 or -3 there's a weak consensus that something is wrong with the comment. But you should't take it personally.
(Ok. I'm now thoroughly sick of karma discussions which seem to have taken a lot of stuff the last few days. I hereby resolve to not make any comments about karma until the end of the month. Seriously. It just isn't that important.)
"Oh that simple.." comes across as condescending (and contains a punctuation error, which is made worse by the juxtaposition).
No one downvoted that comment because they thought it was wrong, precisely. "sometimes the majority is right and sometimes it is wrong" is not really something that can be argued with. That comment got downvoted because it made you sound like a jerk.
This is useful criticism.
Let me explain the situation. I was saying that it's not good idea to believe something because the majority does, then people are disagreeing with me, AlexMennen said:
Most people believe that it is impossible to travel faster than light, although they don't understand why that is and it is all very abstract to them. I speculate that this might be connected with the fact that it is impossible to travel faster than light.
It doesn't make a lot of sense, talking about light speed with the recent news. I guessed there would be some meta morals to it and lots of hidden meaning. It was a surprise that he was really just giving one example of where the majority was right: on the other hand it rejects those cases where the majority is wrong (so it is slanted against what I was claiming).
I wonder if I still sound like a jerk in light of this, in any case how can I post a comment with the same meaning without sounding that way?
believe something because the majority does
Beliefs come in degrees. Isolate each factor leading to your final degree of belief.
We can also ask questions about why people believe what they do and there are always multiple important reasons. Why does Bob believe in global warming? Because it is high status and it makes sense to him that gasses could trap heat. why is it high status? Because experts believe it. Why does it make sense to him? Because he heard it described, simplified, in a way that was internally consistent. Experts' beliefs and the consistency of the story are both related to how likely the proposition about global warming is to be true.
Counterfactuals are helpful. What is the probability that global climate change is real? You have an answer. Now, imagine that one scientist changes his mind from this opinion to an extreme minority one that weather events have been flukes, or not unusual, or caused directly by an anomaly in the sun that is about t return to normal, or whatever. If you claim that that would have literally on effect on your beliefs, you will suffer from a line-drawing problem as you are asked about hypothetical scenarios in which ever more scientists defect from the scientific consensus. You would have to explain something like why 10% of scientists believing something is meaningless, but 10.0000001% isn't.
The important thing is to not become misled by the fact that moderately different scenarios would result in your having, wholly appropriately, indistinguishably similar confidence. Very different scenarios leave one with much less confidence.
Likewise, you oughtn't say there is no important relationship between a layperson's belief and reality just because the relationship is attenuated by many intermediate steps and weak causal effects at each link in the chain.
I am tempted to downvote both for irony and the below reasons, but I won't. Especially because I largely agree with you.
But I do feel like this post comes across as complaining about being downvoted. Of course no one likes it, but ask people to explain their downvotes, and people will typically respectfully reply. This is actually pretty common, and I think is far more appropriate than making a discussion thread about it.
ask people to explain their downvotes, and people will typically respectfully reply.
See, for example, this thread.
In this case I'm downvoting because I don't want people telling me that I should not downvote in cases where I believe downvoting is the correct action.
Well, I guess you could stand on principle, but it seems pretty meaningless to only do so after the account's been deleted.
Well, I guess you could stand on principle, but it seems pretty meaningless to only do so after the account's been deleted.
The account holder would never have been the target audience of my reply. Nor is 'lower total karma of the poster' ever a significant component of my motivation for a downvote a comment or post.
The account deletion is essentially irrelevant.
Look here for example.
Let's not discourage discussion by downvoting people that "are wrong". It is hard enough to correct your mistaken beliefs, if a community is pushing you away for having them this makes it even worse.
The thumbs down button should be for posts that are bad, if someone says something you don't agree with it you should argue instead. It's unhealthy to just push away people that have different views, rather than challenging yourself to explain why they are wrong.
Here is an exercise that will help improve LessWrong: watch for reasons why you downvote comments you do the next couple of days.