I upvoted & disagreevoted on this, and I’m going to try to defend the ‘call for explanation’ a bit—especially for disagreevotes, I generally agree that downvote signals are more clear.
I think sometimes it’s not really clear why a post is being disagree voted, especially if it makes a number of different points. Does a disagree vote represent a vote against the points on balance, or the major point, or a particular crux of this issue? My posts/comments to be a bit on the long-side and I’ve run into this (so it may be self-inflicted). I think the call for explanation can more be seen as a call for replies focusing on a specific section and continuing from there.
For the asymmetry, I grant that’s probably true. On the other hand, it’s probably valuable for people to find cruxes of disagreement in good faith, possibly more so than just a shows of agreement—though I do think there should be more comments saying (I agree and thought paragraph 2 was an excellent statement of position X/changed my mind).
I think fundamentally there’s a collective action problem here where, no we probably don’t want every vote to be accompanied by a comment and explanation of that vote. But as everyone can free ride on others to provide that explanation, we may often find ourselves in a position where there’s a topic where there’s a lot of active disagreement, and a user posts a position but gets disagreevoted and there is no explanation of that vote at all. This might be particularly disheartening for the poster (especially if they are posting against conventional EA wisdom) if they’ve approached the topic in good faith, put a lot of time and effort into writing their comment, and provided a lot supporting evidence for it.
Tl;dr: Overall probably a co-ordination problem—I think we could get value by shifting the norms more towards exploring disagreement on Forum posts/comments more
I upvoted & disagreevoted on this, and I’m going to try to defend the ‘call for explanation’ a bit—especially for disagreevotes, I generally agree that downvote signals are more clear.
I think sometimes it’s not really clear why a post is being disagree voted, especially if it makes a number of different points. Does a disagree vote represent a vote against the points on balance, or the major point, or a particular crux of this issue? My posts/comments to be a bit on the long-side and I’ve run into this (so it may be self-inflicted). I think the call for explanation can more be seen as a call for replies focusing on a specific section and continuing from there.
For the asymmetry, I grant that’s probably true. On the other hand, it’s probably valuable for people to find cruxes of disagreement in good faith, possibly more so than just a shows of agreement—though I do think there should be more comments saying (I agree and thought paragraph 2 was an excellent statement of position X/changed my mind).
I think fundamentally there’s a collective action problem here where, no we probably don’t want every vote to be accompanied by a comment and explanation of that vote. But as everyone can free ride on others to provide that explanation, we may often find ourselves in a position where there’s a topic where there’s a lot of active disagreement, and a user posts a position but gets disagreevoted and there is no explanation of that vote at all. This might be particularly disheartening for the poster (especially if they are posting against conventional EA wisdom) if they’ve approached the topic in good faith, put a lot of time and effort into writing their comment, and provided a lot supporting evidence for it.
Tl;dr: Overall probably a co-ordination problem—I think we could get value by shifting the norms more towards exploring disagreement on Forum posts/comments more