Data point: I often feel a pull towards up-voting comments that I feel have stimulated or advanced my thinking or exemplify a valuable norm of transparency and clarity, but then I hold back because I think I might disagree with the claims made or I think I simply don’t know enough to judge those claims. This is based on a sense that I should avoid contributing to information cascade-type situations (even if, in these cases, any contribution would only be very slight).
This has happened multiple times in this particular thread; there’ve been comments of Oliver’s that I’ve very much appreciated the transparency of, but with which I felt like I still might slightly disagree overall, so I avoided voting either way.
(I’m not saying this is the ideal policy, just that it’s the one I’ve taken so far.)
Data point: I often feel a pull towards up-voting comments that I feel have stimulated or advanced my thinking or exemplify a valuable norm of transparency and clarity, but then I hold back because I think I might disagree with the claims made or I think I simply don’t know enough to judge those claims. This is based on a sense that I should avoid contributing to information cascade-type situations (even if, in these cases, any contribution would only be very slight).
This has happened multiple times in this particular thread; there’ve been comments of Oliver’s that I’ve very much appreciated the transparency of, but with which I felt like I still might slightly disagree overall, so I avoided voting either way.
(I’m not saying this is the ideal policy, just that it’s the one I’ve taken so far.)