I have to agree that commentless downvoting is not a good way to combat infohazards. I'd probably take it a step further and argue that it's not a good way to combat anything, which is why it's not a good way to combat infohazards (and if you disagree that infohazards are ultimately as bad as they are called, then it would probably mean it's a bad thing to try and combat them). 

Its commentless nature means it violates "norm one" (and violates it much more as a super-downvote).  

It means something different than "push stuff that's not that, up", while also being an alternative to doing that.  

I think a complete explanation of why it's not a very good idea doesn't exist yet though, and is still needed.

However, I think there's another thing to consider: Imagine if up-votes and down-votes were all accurately placed. Would they bother you as much? They might not bother you at all if they seemed accurate to you, and therefore if they do bother you, that suggests that the real problem is that they aren't even accurate. 

My feeling is that commentless downvotes are likely a contributing mechanism to the process that leads them to be placed inaccurately, but it is possible that something else is causing them to do that.  

It's a priori very unlikely that any post that's clearly made up of English sentences actually does not even try to communicate anything.

My point is that basically, you could have posted this as a comment on the post instead of it being rejected.

Whenever there is room to disagree about what mistakes have been made and how bad those mistakes are, it becomes more of a problem to apply an exclusion rule like this.

There's a lot of questions here: how far along the axis to apply the rule, which axis or axes are being considered, and how harsh the application of the rule actually is.

It should always be smooth gradients, never sudden discontinuities. Smooth gradients allow the person you're applying them to to update. Sudden discontinuities hurt, which they will remember, and if they come back at all they will still remember it.

It was a mistake to reject this post. This seems like a case where both the rule that was applied is a mis-rule, as well as that it was applied inaccurately - which makes the rejection even harder to justify. It is also not easy to determine which "prior discussion" is being referred to by the rejection reasons.

It doesn't seem like the post was political...at all? Let alone "overly political" which I think is perhaps kind of mind-killy be applied frequently as a reason for rejection. It also is about a subject that is fairly interesting to me, at least: Sentiment drift on Wikipedia.

It seems the author is a 17-year old girl, by the way. 

This isn't just about standards being too harsh, but about whether they are even being applied correctly to begin with.

You write in an extremely fuzzy way that I find hard to understand.

This does. This is a type of criticism that one can't easily translate into an update that can be made to one's practice. You're not saying if I always do this or just in this particular spot, nor are you saying whether it's due to my "writing" (i.e. style) or actually using confused concepts. Also, it's usually not the case that anyone is trying to be worse at communicating, that's why it sounds like a scold.

You have to be careful using blanket "this is false" or "I can't understand any of this," as these statements are inherently difficult to extract from moral judgements. 

I'm sorry if it was hard to understand, you are always free to ask more specific questions. 

To attempt to clarify it a bit more, I'm not trying to say that worse is better. It's that you can't consider rules (i.e. yes / no conditionals) to be absolutely indispensable. 

It is probably indeed a crux but I don't see the reason for needing to scold someone over it.

(That's against my commenting norms by the way, which I'll note that so far you, TAG, and Richard_Kennaway have violated, but I am not going to ban anyone over it. I still appreciate comments on my posts at all, and do hope that everyone still participates. In the olden days, it was Lumifer that used to come and do the same thing.)

I have an expectation that people do not continually mix up critique from scorn, and please keep those things separate as much as possible, as well as only applying the latter with solid justification.

You can see that yes, one of the points I am trying to make is that an assertion / insistence on consistency seems to generally make things worse. This itself isn't that controversial, but what I'd like to do is find better ways to articulate whatever the alternatives to that may be, here.

It's true that one of the main implications of the post is that imprecision is not enough to kill us (but that precision is still a desirable thing). We don't have rules that are simply tautologies or simply false anymore.

At least we're not physicists. They have to deal with things like negative probability, and I'm not even anywhere close to that yet.

First, a question, am I correct in understanding that when you write ~(A and ~A), the first ~ is a typo and you meant to write A and ~A (without the first ~)? Because $\neg (A\wedge \neg A)$ is a tautology and thus maps to true rather than to false.

I thought of this shortly before you posted this response, and I think that we are probably still okay (even though strictly speaking yes, there was a typo). 

Normally we have that ~A means: ~A --> A --> False. However, remember than I am now saying that we can no longer say that "~A" means that "A is False."

So I wrote: 

~(A and ~A) --> A or ~A or (A and ~A)

And it could / should have been:

~(A and ~A) --> (A and ~A) --> False (can omit) ^[1]or A or ~A or (A and ~A).

So, because of False now being something that an operator "bounces off of", technically, we can kind of shorten those formulas. 

Of course this sort of proof doesn't capture the paradoxicalness that you are aiming to capture. But in order for the proof to be invalid, you'd have to invalidate one of $(A\wedge B)⟹A$ and $A⟹(A\vee B)$, both of which seem really fundamental to logic. I mean, what do the operators "and" and "or" even mean, if they don't validate this?

Well, I'd have to conclude that we no longer consider any rules indispensable, per se.  However, I do think "and" and "or" are more indispensable and map to "not not" (two negations) and one negation, respectively. 

1. ^{^}

   False can be re-omitted if we were decide, for example, that whatever we just wrote was wrong and we needed to exit the chain there and restart. However, I don't usually prefer that option.

Well, to use your "real world" example, isn't that just the definition of a manifold (a space that when zoomed in far enough, looks flat)?

I think it satisfies the either-or-"mysterious third thing" formulae.

~(Earth flat and earth ~flat) --> Earth flat (zoomed in) or earth spherical (zoomed out) or (earth more flat-ish the more zoomed in and vice-versa).

So suppose I have ~(A and ~A). Rather than have this map to False, I say that "False" is an object that you always bounce off of; It causes you to reverse-course, in the following way:

~(A and ~A) --> False --> A or ~A or (some mysterious third thing). What is this mysterious third thing? Well, if you insist that A and ~A is possible, then it must be an admixture of these two things, but you'd need to show me what it is for that to be allowed. In other words:

~(A and ~A) --> A or ~A or (A and ~A).

What this statement means in semantic terms is: Suppose you give me a contradiction. Rather than simply try really hard to believe it, or throw everything away entirely, I have a choice between believing A, believing ~A, or believing a synthesis between these two things. 

The most important feature of this construction is that I am no longer faced with simply concluding "false" and throwing it all away. 

Two examples:

Suppose we have the statement 1 = 2^[1]. In most default contexts, this statement simply maps to "false," because it is assumed that this statement is an assertion that the two symbols to the left and right of the equals sign are indistinguishable from one another. 

But what I'm arguing is that "False" is not the end-all, be-all of what this statement can or will be said to mean in all possible universes forever unto eternity. "False" is one possible meaning which is also valid, but it cannot be the only thing that this means. 

So, using our formula from above:

1 = 2 -->^[2] 1 or 2 or (1 and 2). So if you tell me "1 = 2", in return I tell you that you can have either 1, either 2, or either some mysterious third thing which is somehow both 1 and 2 at the same time. 

So you propose to me that (1 and 2) might mean something like 2 (1/2), that is, two halves, which mysteriously are somehow both 1 and 2 at the same time when put together. Great! We've invented the concept of 1/2. 

Second example:

We don't know if A is T and thus that ~A is F or vice-versa. Therefore we do not know if A and ~A is TF or FT. Somehow, it's got to be mysteriously both of these at the same time. And it's totally fine if you don't get what I'm about to say because I haven't really written it anywhere else yet, but this seems to produce two operators, call them "S" (for swap) and "2" (for 2), each duals of one another.

S is the Swaperator, and 2 is the Two...perator. These also buy you the concept of 1/2 as well. But all that deserves more spelling out, I was just excited to bring it up. 

1. ^{^}

   It is arguably appropriate to use 1 == 2 as well, but I want to show that a single equals sign "=" is open to more interpretations because it is more basic. This also has a slightly different meaning too, which is that the symbols 1 and 2 are swappable with one another. 

2. ^{^}

   You could possibly say "--> False or 1 or 2 or ...", too, but then you'd probably not select False from those options, so I think it's okay to omit it.  

I give only maybe a 50% chance that any of the following adequately addresses your concern. 

I think the succinct answer to your question is that it only matters if you happened to give me, e.g., a "2" (or anything else) and you asked me what it was and gave me your {0,1} set. In other words, you lose the ability to prove that 2 is 1 because it's not 0, but I'm not that worried about that.

It appears to be commonly said (see the last paragraph of "Mathematical Constructivism"), that proof assistants like Agda or Coq rely on not assuming LoEM. I think this is because proof assistants rely on the principle of "you can't prove something false, only true." Theorems are the [return] types of proofs, and the "False" theorem has no inhabitants (proofs). 

The law of the excluded middle also seems to me like an insistence that certain questions (like paradoxes) actually remain unanswered. 

That's an argument that it might not be true at all, rather than simply partially true or only not true in weird, esoteric logics.

Besides the one use-case for the paradoxical market: "Will this market resolve to no?" Which resolves to 1/2 (I expect), there may be also:

Start with two-valued logic and negation as well as a two-member set, e.g., {blue, yellow}. I suppose we could also include a $xϵ\{blue,yellow\}$. So including the excluded middle might make this set no longer closed under negation, i.e., ~blue = yellow, and ~yellow = blue, but what about green, which is neither blue nor yellow, but somehow both, mysteriously? Additionally, we might not be able to say for sure that it is neither blue nor yellow, as there are greens which can be close to blue and look bluish, or look close to yellow and look yellowish. You can also imagine pixels in a green square actually being tiled blue next to yellow next to blue etc., or simply green pixels, each seem to produce the same effect viewed from far away. 

So a statement like "x = blue" evaluates to true in an ordinary two-valued logic if x = blue, and false otherwise. But in a {0, 1/2, 1} logic, that statement evaluates to 1/2 if x is green, for example. 

I really don't think I can accept this objection. They are clearly considered both of these, most of the time.

I would really prefer that if you really want to find something to have a problem with, first it's got to be true, then it's got to be meaningful.