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I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
For the record, I do not upvote or downvote people on here, and I would support getting rid of the upvote/downvote system here entirely. It gives me a nice pleasant dopamine hit to see a comment of mine upvoted, and I enjoy that very much, but overall, I feel that upvote/downvote systems make political discussion forums worse, not better. For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience. Not exactly something that inspires intelligent thought.
That said, I disagree with your notion that any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted. Sure, sometimes I write something that does not fit the average Motte writer's political opinions and I get downvoted a lot, and I can clearly infer that it is because the downvoters disagree with me. But given that I often write things that go against the local average and still get upvoted a lot, clearly it is more complicated than that.
But we literally are doing that.
It is the basis of all intelligent thought:
Socrates was a smart guy by all accounts, but I don't think that his kinds of methods were the basis of all intelligent thought. It is telling that in many of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates' opponents are essentially straw-men, written by Plato to serve as a foil for Socrates. Surely Socrates' actual real-life debates were not like this. How much do we know about how Socrates actually spoke and debated?
The Greeks also gave us several other methods for intelligent thought that are very different from Socrates'.
One such is the mathematical method of proof.
Another is the Aristotelian essay. Aristotle used a very different kind of rhetorical approach than the Socrates of Plato's works.
So did Thucydides, whose arguments in the History of the Peloponnesian War are very different from Socrates' style.
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