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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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  1. It is easier to create bullshit than refute it. Therefore refuting bad posts with good logic is a losing proposition.

  2. Unlike responses, downvotes are typically not moderated, so if a post is so bad that the proper response to it would be moderated, a downvote is the best answer.

Unlike responses, downvotes are typically not moderated

Typically? Downvotes are never moderated. (As far as I know, we can't see who upvotes or downvotes a post even if we wanted to. I suppose Zorba could build that capability, but I know of no reason to.)

On reddit you couldn't see it,though AEO could and sometimes did take action based on it. Here, Zorba has control of the codebase so can certainly see it if he wants to.

  1. That's what moderation is for.
  2. I don't understand what your second point is saying.

That's what moderation is for.

The Motte is past the size where mods can be expected to read every single comment. At most they can respond to reports, and even then there's usually a lag time of hours involved. I also personally don't expect the mods to commit themselves to sitting down and personally addressing every bad argument that gets deposited here like a turd on a doorstep.

I don't understand what your second point is saying.

Sometimes a comment is such utter bullshit that accurately/vividly calling it out as the bullshit it is can stray past the threshold where the reply itself violates the rules here. And that's leaving aside the emotive states where you're tempted to leave something more minimally inflammatory than theoretically possible, at which point just downvoting and moving on is better for you and the forum.

Don't ask me how I know the latter.

  1. It's not against the rules to post bullshit, at least provided the bullshit is in long-form prose.

  2. If someone posts bullshit and someone else posts "Bullshit." in response, the second person will get moderated. If they merely downvote, the second person will not be moderated.

We need a rule against long-form bullshit then.

It is easier to create bullshit than refute it.

Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad, downvoting things you disagree just ends up looking like "they hated him because he spoke the truth".

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton[1], they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

That is, a downvoted post be such due to it being wrong, or due to it being heterodox with regards to the majority opinion on this site. A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

[1]Apocryphally:

You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense.

The assertion that The Motte can or should be building consensus, let alone good consensus, is laughable on its face. The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals, which is obviously false to anyone who actually interacts with idiots, and not insulated morons subsisting exclusively on a social diet of nerdy coworkers and college friends.

The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals

No, they weren't. Many people pushed back against that claim. The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.

The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.

You worded this as an unqualified absolute just to troll all of us who disagree with it at that extreme, didn't you?

A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

this comment has a nice "to be fair you have to have a high IQ to understand themotte" type vibe to it, which comes across as pseudointellectual at best.

more seriously though, just because a comment is highly downvoted doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently garbage or that it was a "low IQ" opinion. a lot of very smart opinions or ideas were not deemed to be very popular in the past, and I think it'd be foolish to think that what we think is objectively correct.

just 100 years ago, high IQ people had consensus that smoking was good

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton[1], they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

I'd say I covered that with "Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad".

A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

Strong disagree. Even if you're right about the IQ and what it means (I personally lean to us not being as smart as we think we are), high-IQ does not mean unbiased, and so we are not a representative sample of all high-IQ people, which means we are perfectly capable of downvoting comments just because we don't like them, rather than them being wrong.

To expand on that, a +35 comment is easily in the top 10% of most-upvoted comments on any given thread. Most comments are +10 or less. Community consensus with such a small group means very little.

Downvotes don't refute BS to any meaningful degree. Most trivial BS can be refuted by knowing basic fallacies, and prolific BS'ers will get modded for low-quality posts.

Downvotes in practice are just like people writing "You're wrong" without elaboration.

Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged. Downvotes are more efficient at that than actually posting "you're wrong", and attract less moderator ire.

Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged.

You're wrong.

I don't have vast swaths of time to devote to responding at length to certain posts, even when I want to, and on the occasions when I do the iron is often no longer hot, as it were. I don't see a problem with downvoting and moving on.

This assumes your agreement or disagreement on its own is important or worth sharing. It isn’t.

Oh? And why isn't it? Presumably we aren't all conversing in a vacuum, nor is the detailed articulate response of every single person necessarily desirable, even for the most riveting posts. I don't agree generally with you about what you term "Motte monkeys," however, so I don't imagine we'll end up in agreement.

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