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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2306 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 23, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I don't see a feedback thread, but can we make the comment scores/votes visible internally instead of having to wait a day? The score would be visible to whoever made the post but invisible externally, until the 24 hours has passed. This would be useful feedback so I can delete the post if it gets downvoted too much instead of having to wait a day. Sometimes it's hard to predict how unpopular a post is just by the replies, like about my posts on cities and crime which was heavily downvoted. Had I seen the vote count sooner I would have deleted it. I feel bad about having posted it and regret it.

I'm late on this but chiming in to join the chorus advising against deletion. Getting downvoted can initially feel terrifying because it conjures up the very primal fear of getting shunned by your community to eke out a lone survival out in the savannah, but it's also used as a last refuge when you've got nothing else to offer. I know that whenever I kick a hornet's nest and post about my favorite hobby horse the downvotes will come out the woodwork, but because it's not accompanied with any substantive critique I know it's just ineffectual flailing. Why should something like that bother me?

Don't delete things just because they're unpopular.

As others have said, sometimes you'll get downvoted for going against themotte's consensus, and sometimes themotte's wrong and needs to hear it.

I enjoy a lot of your posts, don’t delete them.

But don't delete posts just because they're downvoted. That's a one way trip to a boring echo chamber.

Post locally unpopular views that you sincerely hold and then don't be too bothered by the negative points. Reddit has trained people to be bad posters. Let's resist importing their diseased posting culture.

That was a perfectly fine comment.

I can predict how much my posts will be downvoted by simply thinking how much I’m going against the Motte’s grain. So when I comment about evidence for HBD, I get upvoted, and when I say anything negative about Trump, I get downvoted.

I’m always amused when I get downvoted for expressing something directly in line with Siskind-Yudkowskian thought. The apple has fallen far from the tree here, on some issues at least.

(Of course, the SSC subreddit just had a post where someone asked why there was so much discussion about IQ and a significant number of commenters took the “IQ is meaningless” line, which is even more ironic.)

You said something positive about Blue and negative about Red, so you were obviously going to get heavy downvotes no matter what the truth or quality was.

@ymeskhkout gets heavily downvoted for his election comments every time.

If we all just try to avoid downvotes, we will just lose contrarian views (ironic in a place overrepresented with irascible contrarians).

@ymeskhkout gets heavily downvoted for his election comments every time.

TheMotte doesn't deserve him.

"Your boos mean nothing" etc etc. I'm still having fun ☺

Had I seen the vote count sooner I would have deleted it. I feel bad about having posted it and regret it.

I agree with everyone saying you shouldn't do that, so please add my bullying to the campaign against you succumbing to bullying.

As for internally visible comment scores, I agree with @Primaprimaprima that the current system virtually guarantees I visit the motte the day after I make a comment. That's good slot machine design. However, when I make a comment on reddit, I still typically check back several times to see how the score plays out, so I'm not sure that benefit justifies the current approach.

The best argument against making self-scores visible is that it would change the behavior of posters themselves in a hot conversation. When underwater scorewise, one tends to adopt the embattled, passive-aggressive stance of a martyr being inquisitored. The people you're talking to respond in kind. I don't like that dynamic on reddit and wouldn't like it here.

It can get especially bad on Reddit when you're in a back-and-forth conversation with someone that goes enough layers deep that probably nobody else is reading your comments except the responder, and you can see when they're downvoting each reply you make.

I always liked that, frankly. Someone gets to a point like "All prime numbers are odd; what are you, stupid?!", and the part of my brain that evaluates logic is still overriding the part of my brain that evaluates people so I reply with the obvious counterexample anyway, but then the downvote comes and it wakes me up and I drop the thread.

It’s more fun to check back in 24 hours and see how many points you got.

Gamification.

I'm against this proposal.

The point of hiding likes and dislikes is to discourage echo chamber dynamics. Whether consciously or unconsciously (it appears to be conscious in your case), getting immediate feedback on how well your post was received by the community will influence you to write (and hence think) in that way in the future: making points or asking questions which you predict will be well-received by the community, and avoiding ones that don't.

That's not the kind of space the Motte is supposed to be. Before posting, you shouldn't be asking yourself "will other posters like this?" You should be asking yourself "is this a productive contribution to the community, and does it adhere to the rules?" As long as the answer to both of the latter questions is yes, you should post it, regardless of how popular you expect it to be.

If anything, this is reason not to do it imo. Deleting posts just because they got downvoted is terrible behavior.

Downvoting posts that are valuable enough you don't want them deleted is also bad behavior; @greyenlightenment deleting downvoted posts is giving TheMotte exactly what it's asking for. If that makes TheMotte a worse place, that's not on him. It's on us.

If TheMotte doesn't want people to delete comments that contribute to the conversation, it shouldn't be downvoting comments that contribute to the conversation. If you want those comments to persist, my actionable advice is to upvote comments that you think are valuable, but that you think are going to be downvoted.

This is actually a much better reason to upvote than the absolute "quality" of the comment, because 5 "high quality" comments that are all saying the same thing provide a single comment's worth of ideas. If TheMotte wants ideological diversity, it should vote in favor of ideological diversity.

Instead people upvote comments they agree with and downvote comments they disagree with, and then wonder why we all believe the same thing.

For starters, I don't downvote because I disagree, so you're preaching about that to the wrong person. But that aside, the conversation is the conversation. It shouldn't be altered just because someone is mad that they got downvoted.

I tried to be pretty clear on which part of my post was addressed to you and which part was addressed to TheMotte more broadly.

Expecting people to not delete comments the community hates seems at least as unreasonable as asking people not to downvote posts they disagree with.

You seem to have picked up 4-7 weird downvoters for, like, no visible reason. Please don't delete your posts because of them: I'd rather see your content and then call out the downvoters for being little bitches, because I don't see anything wrong with anything in your history.

I think people are getting paranoid and downvoting a lot more to counteract a few mass-spamming trolls the mods refuse to ban, just to stop them manufacturing the appearance of consensus by sheer volume. And after doing that for too long downvoting for disagreement becomes a habit.

Who are these mass-spamming trolls? DM if you don’t want that to be a public debate.

I don’t get the impression that our vote trends are driven by (or against) a few users. As with Reddit, there are popular and unpopular opinions, and a silent majority will vote without ever saying anything. Getting labeled a troll is a good way to attract downvotes. So is complaining about vote distributions.

We probably have more users with one or another principled voting strategy, but we definitely have more who will upvote anything critical of progressives.

Why do you want to delete something just because it's unpopular?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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