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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				
User ID: 342


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

				
				
				

				

					2 followers  

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					joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC
				


				
					

					
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.




I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.


The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.




STEM gave us:


    

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    Nuclear weapons
    

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    Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes
    

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    Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality
    

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    AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime
    

    • 



We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM.  The university should be the institution where that happens.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So men are associated with the good version of competition - pure, honorable, based on rules and tradition, with a spiritual purpose.  And women are associated with the bad version of competition - spiteful, lawless, poisonous, visited on people who want no part of it.  Bit suspicious that it would break down so cleanly like that.


Why make it a gendered thing?  Clearly all humans have the capacity to engage in both sorts of activity.  Need we point out that men commit the vast majority of acts of rape, murder, and torture?  Almost all mass shooters are men - how's that for poison?  Granted, a lot of victims of violent crime are asking for it in various ways, but many aren't (I know from firsthand experience).  So much for honorable and rule-governed conduct.


If I had to choose between being physically assaulted or being called fat, I'd generally prefer being called fat.  If the question is who "shits in people's souls" more, then men do so much more shitting that it's not even a contest.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Are the replication crisis in academia, the Russian military's apparent fecklessness in Ukraine, and GPT hallucinations (along with rationalist's propensity to chase them), all manifestations of the same underlying noumenon?




Plainly not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It essentially removes the market forces that push people away from poor decisions.




That's basically the raison d'être of leftism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.


Personally if I was in charge and there was a mod decision that required a subjective judgement call, I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum.  I especially value posters like @guesswho who have alternative viewpoints on the "classic" culture war topics.  It makes these discussions a lot more interesting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I know that the “culture war” thread has long since morphed into the “general thread for society and current events”, but I think there should be some sort of restriction on what topics are allowed in top level posts. Otherwise there’s not much point in maintaining a separate thread.


This doesn’t even have a tenuous connection to the CW and would have been better off as its own separate thread.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This could be one of the single biggest aesthetic improvements in modern history.




To each their own!  We all have our preferences.


One of the best outcomes of feminism for me personally has been all the fat women in advertising and movies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.




Then plainly, the humanities needs our help!  We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, I agree that men and women are different.  But are we allowed to invoke that as an explanation whenever we want to?  Sometimes men and women behave the same, instead of differently - what then?  Do we just say "sometimes men and women are the same, sometimes they're different, and that's all there is to it"?  It would give you unlimited explanatory license to justify whatever you wanted in regards to theories of gendered behavior, without ever having to address gaps in the theory.


My concern is that people are starting with the conclusion they want to prove ("gays are icky and pedos are icky, therefore they must be linked in some way") and then working backwards.  So you end up with a just-so story that adds more and more epicycles to prove the desired conclusion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But presumably you also want to say that boys getting molested by men turns them gay. So why does it have the opposite effect on boys that it has on girls? How come, instead of the boy’s trust and comfort with men being permanently damaged, he instead becomes hyper-attracted to men and seeks out even more intimacy with men?


(Also second wave feminists thought that being a lesbian was pretty much the most virtuous thing that a woman could do so it strikes me as odd that any of them would try to link it to trauma.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ok, maybe my disclaimer had the opposite effect from what I intended.  Sorry for not being more clear.


In general I am opposed to the naive libertarian line of "just build your own X".  I know very well that you can't build your own university system, you can't build your own DNS, you can't build your own facebook.  That's why I'm not a libertarian.


But!  There comes a point where you have to make an assessment of the situation, and you either decide you're going to do something about it, or you need to just live with the consequences.  It should be assumed at this point that any cultural space that is in any sense "mainstream" or "corporate" is leftist by default.  It's omnipresent; so don't be surprised when they come for you and your favorite thing.  That's the default assumption.


So you have two choices: you can either do something to influence culture, or you can accept the culture that other people have made for you.  Yes, you can't just set up your own parallel culture overnight, but you can't say that you're just condemned to inaction either.  I mean, look at Stonetoss.  He's creating a cultural product that is to the right of even what the majority of mottizens would want, with all the attendant controversy, but he's still out there doing his thing.  Why can't you do what Stonetoss is doing?  If culture is that important to you, why aren't you making something?


I know exactly what it's like to have something you love colonized and ruined by wokeists.  I'm not just glibly dismissing the issue.  It's just that I can only see this narrative play out so many times, the narrative of "I can't believe those leftists came for X classic wonderful thing AGAIN!" before I ask, ok yes we know that this is their M.O., so what are YOU doing about it?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:






Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.






It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern feminist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.




This doesn't sit right with me.


Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers.  It's simple supply and demand.  Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap.  The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope.  Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task.  Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding.  Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives.  If you can't do the same, that's on you.


Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course.  If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc.  Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are.  If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat




I don't think that people really do this on a mass scale, and I've never seen an actual argument put forth for this thesis.  It seems like one of those cached thoughts that just got repeated enough until everyone believed it.


Not to say that large social groups are always infallibly correct when it comes to political beliefs either.  But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing.  When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?  I don't think that's accurate.  Their complaints are grounded in actual facts, its just that there's disagreement over the cause and interpretation of those facts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The left wing seems like it has a perpetual conspiracy theory about Republican plots to institute an actual hard theocracy




Not every mistaken or unsupported belief is automatically a conspiracy theory.  There has to be some sort of criteria to distinguish between them.


I think left wing fears about the coming theocracy are better explained as just generalized anxiety about the opposition, or perhaps false beliefs about the views of individual Republicans, although I agree that they easily could become conspiracy theories with the right narrative.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How does that make any sense? What’s the causal mechanism there?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


One of these is the concept that a one's salvation may hinge on a chance encounter with another person whose intervention changes one's life for the better. It strikes me as chaotic, random and therefore unfair. [...] The concept of a mutually supporting community taking collective responsibility for the salvation of their souls is probably much closer to how people thought about Christianity in the past. It almost gives me warm fuzzy feelings, but I still find the chaotic, random nature of it discomforting.




I find this to be one of the more beautiful aspects of Christian thought.  Life isn't always fair.  Coming to an understanding of the intense burdens that have been placed upon your shoulders simply for existing, burdens that you didn't ask for and had no foreknowledge of, offers a powerful antidote to the modern obsession with rationality without thereby causing a descent into total nihilism.  Along similar lines:




"I like Schelling's nice totalitarian view; his idea is that even if you have no choice, you are still fully responsible for it.  [...] It was forever decided, determined in the very fate of Judas, that he will betray Christ; he didn't have a choice.  It was his destiny.  But nonetheless he's fully responsible for it. [...] Schelling's solution of this enigma, which you find already in Kant, is a wonderful one.  It's kind of a transcendental a priori act, it sounds idealist but it's not, it's very close to what in psychoanalysis we would have called the choice of the fundamental phantasy.  In some kind of atemporal a priori act we are, as Sartre would have put it, responsible for our project; for what we are.  Of course in our temporal reality we experience this as our nature, you cannot change it, but fundamentally at an unconscious level we are responsible for it.  And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession.  You have to confess your blah blah.  No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything.  In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.




I find this to be deeply resonant.  Others will find it to be nonsense.  There's no accounting for taste.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the people actually building the technology don’t believe in doom.




I don’t see why the people building the technology should be taken to be any more informed than the average interested layman on this point.


An AI that’s intelligent enough to be an x-risk is, as of today, a purely hypothetical entity. No one can have technical expertise regarding such entities because we have no empirical examples to study. No one knows how it might behave, what its goals might be, how easy it would be to align; one guess is as good as any other.


Professional AI researchers could have technical expertise regarding questions about the rate of AI progress, or how close we may or may not be to building an x-risk level AI; but given disagreement in the field over even basic questions like “are LLMs alone enough for AGI or will they plateau?” I think you could find a professional opinion to support any position you wanted to take.


Thus even the most informed AI researcher’s views on doom and utopia should be viewed primarily as a reflection of their own personal ideological disposition towards AI, rather than as being the result of carefully considered technical arguments.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Art's primary goal is communication.




This word makes me nervous.


At the most simplistic level you get the sorts of awful things that go on in high school English classes, where students decode the "symbols" of the text, which is how you end up with nonsense like "the message of Hamlet is that revenge is bad".  Well why didn't Shakespeare just come out and say that?  Why go through the trouble of making up a whole story?  It makes the artist out to be some kind of lunatic.  I think we're in agreement that this is no good.


But even this idea of "communicating things that can't be put into words", I think it still doesn't capture the magnitude of what goes on in authentic creativity.  I think it makes the process too subjective - it conjures images of like, the artist just has a feeling one day, or comes up with a thought, and thinks "ah, it would be nice to communicate this".


Derrida gave a lovely description of what he felt when he was writing Of Grammatology:




"I actually had the feeling that something very unique for me took place.  I had the impression that an interpretive edge, a lever, appeared to me.  It's not as though I created it myself.  I never have the feeling, even when I'm happy with a text I write, I never have the feeling that it's me.  This is why I have a feeling both of responsibility and irresponsibility when I write a text.  When I write, I feel strangely responsible and irresponsible, as though I had transcribed something that had imposed itself on me.  In Of Grammatology, I had this feeling in an even stronger way.  I felt as though something had happened to me.  I don't want to give this a religious sensibility - it wasn't an apparition or an ecstasy - but that something had taken hold of me and happened not by me, but to me."




I think moments of genuine creativity always have this sort of texture - this feeling that you've discovered something that is common property.




I'm somewhat okay with AI taking over productive is because it will fulfill the commercial and consumptive aspects of art, leaving the artists who are looking to express and idea that is difficult to put into words.




That would be a catastrophe.


(At the very least, artists don't experience commercial art as a burden that's keeping them from making "real" art - they need the money! And they're very happy to get paid for something they enjoy doing anyway!  Take commercial art away and they still need to find some way to make a living.)




Can you expand how the failure of the artist leads you to compelled to reject God?




Sorry if I was confusing here.  I didn't stop believing in God because of art or aesthetic considerations or anything like that.  I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.


I've softened on some of these considerations over the years and I'm willing to keep an open mind.  But those were my initial motivations at any rate.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why is it a bad thing to be an appendage of an opinion-forming group?


In some sense, we are all opinion-forming groups of one, and every time we post, we are acting as ambassadors of that group of which we are the sole member.


I’m not trying to be cheeky. I really just don’t see why it would matter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You know I’m a man right?


Anyway I bear no ill will towards you, so if you don’t want to continue the discussion we don’t have to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Most people know it's just a chatbot, but a significant number of users have seriously and unironically fallen in love with their Replikas, and come to believe they are alive and sentient. Even people who know it's just a chatbot become emotionally attached anyway.




Well we have to keep in mind that this is not in any way a controlled experiment; there are lots of confounding variables.  We can't adopt a straightforward explanation of "if people become attached to the chatbot then that must be because they thought its output was just that good".  There are all sorts of reasons why people might be biased in favor of rating the chatbot as being better than it actually is.


You have your garden-variety optimists from /r/singularity, people who are fully bought into the hype train and want to ride it all the way to the end.  These types are very easily excited by any new AI product that comes out because they want to believe the hype, they want to see a pattern of rapid advancement that will prove that hard takeoff is near.  They've primed themselves to believe that anything an AI does is great by default.


Then you have the types of angry and lonely men who hang out on /r9k/, i.e. the primary target audience of AI sexbots.  Normally I don't like calling things "misogynist" but in this case it really fits, they really do hate women because they feel like they've been slighted by them and they're quite bitter about the whole dating thing.  They would love to make a performance out of having a relationship with a chatbot because that would let them turn around and say to women "ha! Even a robot can do your job better than you can.  I never needed you anyway."  Liking the chatbot isn't so much about liking the chatbot, but rather it's about attacking people whom they feel wronged by.


There are all sorts of ways a person might conceptualize their relationship with the chatbot, all sorts of narrative they might like to play out.  They might like to think of themselves as a particularly empathetic and open-minded person, and by embracing relationships with AI they are taking the first bold step in expanding humanity's social circle.  None of these motivations have to rise to the level of consciousness of course.  All of them are different factors that could influence a person's perception of the situation even if they're not actively acknowledged.


The point is that it's hard to get a neutral read on how "good" a chatbot is because the technology itself is so emotionally and philosophically charged.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Can I ask what your background in philosophy is?




I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.




How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?




It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all.  It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls".  Nothing more.




At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.




Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do.  They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me".  It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.




I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell.




I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious.  There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification.  Certainly.


But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist?  Certainly not!  It's pretty clear to me that they do exist!  Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest.  Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort?  I don't think so.  They should at least be given a fair hearing.  I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either.  You don't need a fancy theory to see that.


Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people.  Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".


It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken.  One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:




This mystery is in the last resort the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other. That’s the logic of the “subject assumed to know” which was isolated by Lacan as the central axis, or stronghold, of the phenomenon of transference. The analyst is in advance assumed to know – what? The meaning of the analysand’s symptoms. This knowledge is of course an illusion, but it is a necessary one: it is only through this supposition of knowledge that, at the end, some real knowledge can be produced.




(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s already been acknowledged that longstanding posters with lots of AAQCs will be given a bit of extra wiggle room, and I would simply extend that to posters with underrepresented viewpoints as well, because the mere existence of a rare viewpoint is its own type of Quality Contribution.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don't think that post was particularly tactful. Starting right off the bat by claiming the person is being weird isn't very tactful, just the opposite.




We might subjectively disagree over how tactful or not it is to call someone's post "weird" in this context.  But the point is, I don't think 16 people downvoted that post because it called the parent post "weird".  I think 16 people downvoted that post because it questioned how committed Republicans were to the principles of the anti-lockdown cause.


Posts with sharper personal insults than "weird" still manage to accumulate upvotes, if the content itself is popular enough.  I already linked one.  It's not that hard to find others (from multiple different users).




people who complain about being downvoted for not fitting into the "echochamber" of this place




But these people are simply correct in many cases.  In every community with reddit-style voting, posts that disagree with the consensus viewpoint are more likely to be downvoted.  This is simply obvious to me based on 15+ years of watching how different internet communities behave, and my knowledge of how I personally use the voting buttons, particularly with posts that provoke a strong emotional reaction from me.  I can't recall any significant counterexamples, and TheMotte is no exception.


I want to reiterate that using the vote button as an agree/disagree button isn't a bad thing.  It's natural and unavoidable.  The solution is to simply not have any punishment associated with a low comment score.  It's already a good first step that TheMotte doesn't hide low scoring comments like reddit and HN do, and I think we should remove the rate limiting as well.