When I first came across this post, it had 10 down-votes. People who are down-voting, can you please explain why? To just down-vote seems unproductive.
One reason I can think this may be happening is that people who are down-voting are reading OP to be saying “I am not welcome to open discussion and new ideas” so they see no point in attempting to discuss. I don’t think that is an accurate view of the post however. And even if it were, it doesn’t help the other forum-goers who would like to see the opposing points made which are supposedly sound enough that some portion of EAs had no problem putting the post pretty deep in the negative.
[I didn’t downvote.] I fear the story is that this is something of a ‘hot button’ issue, and people in either ‘camp’ have sensitivities about publicly speaking out on one side or the other for fear of how others in the opposing ‘camp’ may react towards them. (The authors of this document are anonymous; previous conversations on this area in this forum have had detractors also use anon accounts or make remarks along the lines of, ‘I strongly disagree with this, but I don’t want to elaborate further’). Hence why people who might be opposed to this (for whatever reason) preferring anonymous (albeit less-informative) feedback via downvoting.
There are naturally less charitable explanations along the lines of tribalism, brigadeing, etc. etc.
People who are down-voting, can you please explain why? To just down-vote seems unproductive.
Are you implying that every time someone downvotes a post they should provide an accompanying explanation of their decision? If not, what makes this post different from others?
I’m not OP but my thoughts—I agree that when I see _a lot_ of downvotes on a seemingly reasonable post that had a decent amount of work and thought put into it and _no one_ explains why, I think there is a collective action problem that could discourage future contributions and weaken discourse. So while I wouldn’t think any one individual should be obligated to explain their downvotes, I think the community in aggregate does have such an obligation in these cases where there are a lot of downvotes and there is no clearly obvious reason why (e.g., obvious spam).
I strongly agree with Peter’s thoughts on this, and wrote up my own reasoning here. Basically, I read a downvote to mean either “I think you’re wrong” or “there’s a definite factual error here” and it’s frustrating to see lots of downvotes with no indication of what might be wrong.
Sometimes, I can guess pretty easily at why I think someone might have downvoted, but a post’s author might not be in the same position (very frustrating for them), and I don’t want to speak on a downvoter’s behalf by speculating about their hypothetical beliefs (which I may well get wrong).
It takes a long time to craft a response to posts like these. Even if there are clear problems with the post, given the sensitive topic you have to spend a lot of time on nuance, checking citations, and getting the tone right. That is a very high bar, one that I don’t think is reasonable to expect everyone to pass. In contrast, people who agree seem to get a pass for silently upvoting.
That’s a reasonable objection. I wouldn’t mind seeing even a non-nuanced response (e.g. “I think this post undervalues the utility of X compared to Y”) rather than no response, but many other readers don’t share my preferences and might take issue with that kind of comment (especially for this topic). And of course, mobile users are especially disadvantaged when it comes to comment-writing.
Still, if someone is a downvoter and wants to do something helpful for others in the same situation, creating one critical response that can then be upvoted (showing the relative popularity of objection X vs. objections Y, Z, etc.) seems unusually valuable.
When I first came across this post, it had 10 down-votes. People who are down-voting, can you please explain why? To just down-vote seems unproductive.
One reason I can think this may be happening is that people who are down-voting are reading OP to be saying “I am not welcome to open discussion and new ideas” so they see no point in attempting to discuss. I don’t think that is an accurate view of the post however. And even if it were, it doesn’t help the other forum-goers who would like to see the opposing points made which are supposedly sound enough that some portion of EAs had no problem putting the post pretty deep in the negative.
[I didn’t downvote.] I fear the story is that this is something of a ‘hot button’ issue, and people in either ‘camp’ have sensitivities about publicly speaking out on one side or the other for fear of how others in the opposing ‘camp’ may react towards them. (The authors of this document are anonymous; previous conversations on this area in this forum have had detractors also use anon accounts or make remarks along the lines of, ‘I strongly disagree with this, but I don’t want to elaborate further’). Hence why people who might be opposed to this (for whatever reason) preferring anonymous (albeit less-informative) feedback via downvoting.
There are naturally less charitable explanations along the lines of tribalism, brigadeing, etc. etc.
Are you implying that every time someone downvotes a post they should provide an accompanying explanation of their decision? If not, what makes this post different from others?
I’m not OP but my thoughts—I agree that when I see _a lot_ of downvotes on a seemingly reasonable post that had a decent amount of work and thought put into it and _no one_ explains why, I think there is a collective action problem that could discourage future contributions and weaken discourse. So while I wouldn’t think any one individual should be obligated to explain their downvotes, I think the community in aggregate does have such an obligation in these cases where there are a lot of downvotes and there is no clearly obvious reason why (e.g., obvious spam).
That makes sense.
I strongly agree with Peter’s thoughts on this, and wrote up my own reasoning here. Basically, I read a downvote to mean either “I think you’re wrong” or “there’s a definite factual error here” and it’s frustrating to see lots of downvotes with no indication of what might be wrong.
Sometimes, I can guess pretty easily at why I think someone might have downvoted, but a post’s author might not be in the same position (very frustrating for them), and I don’t want to speak on a downvoter’s behalf by speculating about their hypothetical beliefs (which I may well get wrong).
It takes a long time to craft a response to posts like these. Even if there are clear problems with the post, given the sensitive topic you have to spend a lot of time on nuance, checking citations, and getting the tone right. That is a very high bar, one that I don’t think is reasonable to expect everyone to pass. In contrast, people who agree seem to get a pass for silently upvoting.
That’s a reasonable objection. I wouldn’t mind seeing even a non-nuanced response (e.g. “I think this post undervalues the utility of X compared to Y”) rather than no response, but many other readers don’t share my preferences and might take issue with that kind of comment (especially for this topic). And of course, mobile users are especially disadvantaged when it comes to comment-writing.
Still, if someone is a downvoter and wants to do something helpful for others in the same situation, creating one critical response that can then be upvoted (showing the relative popularity of objection X vs. objections Y, Z, etc.) seems unusually valuable.