Very disappointing lack of consistency here, which essentially demonstrates that the criticisms of the previous post, while framed as criticisms of the post itself, were actually about the side chosen.
A few observations on that from someone who did not vote on the Trump post or this one:
This seems to rely on an assumption that the commenters on the prior post had the same motivations as one might assign to the broader voter pool. It’s certainly possible, but hardly certain.
It’s impossible to completely divorce oneself from object-level views when deciding whether a post has failed to address or acknowledge sufficiently important considerations in the opposite direction. Yet such a failure is (and I think, has to be) a valid reason to downvote. It’s reasonable to me that a voter would find the missing issues in the Trump piece sufficiently important, and the issues you identify for Harris as having much less significance for a number of reasons.
Partisan political posts are disfavored for various reasons, including some your comment mentions. I think it’s fine for voters to maintain higher voting standards for such posts. Moreover, it feels easier for those posts to be net-negative because they are closer to zero-sum in nature; John’s candidate winning the election means Jane’s candidate losing. “It would be better for this post not to be on the Forum” is a plausible reason to downvote. Those factors make downvoting for strong disagreement more plausible than on non-political posts. This is especially true insofar as the voter thinks the resulting discussion will sound like ten thousand other political debates and contribute little if at all to finding truth.
Finally, there are good reasons for people to be less willing to leave object-level comments on posts like this one or the Trump one. First, arguing about politics is exhausting and usually unfruitful. Two, it risks derailing the Forum into a discussion of topics rather removed from effective altruism (e.g., were the various criminal charges against Trump and lawsuits against Musk legit? how biased in the mainstream US media?)
A few observations on that from someone who did not vote on the Trump post or this one:
This seems to rely on an assumption that the commenters on the prior post had the same motivations as one might assign to the broader voter pool. It’s certainly possible, but hardly certain.
It’s impossible to completely divorce oneself from object-level views when deciding whether a post has failed to address or acknowledge sufficiently important considerations in the opposite direction. Yet such a failure is (and I think, has to be) a valid reason to downvote. It’s reasonable to me that a voter would find the missing issues in the Trump piece sufficiently important, and the issues you identify for Harris as having much less significance for a number of reasons.
Partisan political posts are disfavored for various reasons, including some your comment mentions. I think it’s fine for voters to maintain higher voting standards for such posts. Moreover, it feels easier for those posts to be net-negative because they are closer to zero-sum in nature; John’s candidate winning the election means Jane’s candidate losing. “It would be better for this post not to be on the Forum” is a plausible reason to downvote. Those factors make downvoting for strong disagreement more plausible than on non-political posts. This is especially true insofar as the voter thinks the resulting discussion will sound like ten thousand other political debates and contribute little if at all to finding truth.
Finally, there are good reasons for people to be less willing to leave object-level comments on posts like this one or the Trump one. First, arguing about politics is exhausting and usually unfruitful. Two, it risks derailing the Forum into a discussion of topics rather removed from effective altruism (e.g., were the various criminal charges against Trump and lawsuits against Musk legit? how biased in the mainstream US media?)