I have no idea how much this kind of voting behaviour varies from discussions about one cause area to another, but I can confirm that this happens a lot in various discussions on multiple different topics. People seem keen to karma downvote/​strongly downvote posts or comments they disagree with, regardless of quality. I surmise this is probably just people being mad and having a knee-jerk reaction, in a lot of cases.
I recently had an experience where someone was using a technical term incorrectly, and I left two comments trying to correct the use of this term. These comments didn’t get responded to, but they did get strongly downvoted. It was enough that it triggered me getting rate limited from commenting on the forum! This just seems like a case where someone felt spiteful that I pointed out they made a mistake.
That’s one example, but people do this all the time. Another recent example is here, where I didn’t notice or complain about the downvoting, but someone else noticed it and complained about it on my behalf.
People in this community are only human, and we’re affected by the same impulses as anybody else. We have the same cognitive/​psychological biases as anyone else and the same problems with emotional self-regulation as anyone else. It takes a certain amount of discipline for me to remain judicious about my downvotes (or, on rare occasions, quickly undo a downvote I made in a moment of irritation).
To the extent it’s a real problem, it’s a problem where it’s not a one-off spar between two people (or a few), but where it’s systemic around certain ideas or topics. I get the impression people sort of knee-jerk/​undiscerningly upvote posts and comments that support the narrative that near-term AGI is likely, and downvote posts and comments that challenge this narrative, even when the actual content is narrow in scope, e.g. pointing out a mistake in something that promotes a near-term AGI narrative.
If you want to express mainstream North American liberal/​progressive views on social justice-related topics, forget about it. The downvotes will fall like a cloud of daggers. (The Overton window of the EA Forum is a bit skewed in that regard — and it’s extremely skewed for the LessWrong users who come over here — where some people will defend views they concede are or might be offensive and wrong, such as scientific racism or white nationalism, on the grounds of free speech or neutrality or intellectual freedom or whatever, but do not extend the same defense to the sort of bog standard social justice views that mainstream liberal or progressive politicians or academics generally affirm. I think Kamala Harris or Barack Obama might get downvoted on the EA Forum talking about systemic racism, sexism, or trans rights in the ways they already do in public appearances, and an authoritarian white nationalist like Curtis Yarvin — who many people on LessWrong seem to be a fan of — might get upvoted for some edgy take about Black-on-Black crime or race and IQ or something.)
I find the ways that I see people on the EA Forum circle the wagons around near-term AGI and social justice quite demented — sorry to be so blunt. Someone can make a post that says we should try to contact aliens to warn them about AGI and that gets +27 karma, but if you point out someone used a term from machine learning incorrectly that gets 0 or negative karma, and if you get into arguments about social justice you will get negative karma about the half the time, seemingly regardless of what you say (at least, I can’t figure out the pattern, if there is one). It just seems like if you are willing to entertain really strange ideas like the aliens thing, you should also be willing to entertain mainstream ideas that many experts endorse — I mean specifically things that don’t go against EA’s core principles and haven’t been discussed to death already, about which there isn’t already a consensus within the community.
I guess it doesn’t surprise me that people might knee-jerk downvote entirely reasonable comments about the limited market potential for humane insecticides or things of that nature, since that’s similar. Maybe it’s an example of in-group polarization, where people want to fiercely defend an opinion that’s extreme relative to the general population or out-group.
I have no idea how much this kind of voting behaviour varies from discussions about one cause area to another, but I can confirm that this happens a lot in various discussions on multiple different topics. People seem keen to karma downvote/​strongly downvote posts or comments they disagree with, regardless of quality. I surmise this is probably just people being mad and having a knee-jerk reaction, in a lot of cases.
I recently had an experience where someone was using a technical term incorrectly, and I left two comments trying to correct the use of this term. These comments didn’t get responded to, but they did get strongly downvoted. It was enough that it triggered me getting rate limited from commenting on the forum! This just seems like a case where someone felt spiteful that I pointed out they made a mistake.
That’s one example, but people do this all the time. Another recent example is here, where I didn’t notice or complain about the downvoting, but someone else noticed it and complained about it on my behalf.
People in this community are only human, and we’re affected by the same impulses as anybody else. We have the same cognitive/​psychological biases as anyone else and the same problems with emotional self-regulation as anyone else. It takes a certain amount of discipline for me to remain judicious about my downvotes (or, on rare occasions, quickly undo a downvote I made in a moment of irritation).
To the extent it’s a real problem, it’s a problem where it’s not a one-off spar between two people (or a few), but where it’s systemic around certain ideas or topics. I get the impression people sort of knee-jerk/​undiscerningly upvote posts and comments that support the narrative that near-term AGI is likely, and downvote posts and comments that challenge this narrative, even when the actual content is narrow in scope, e.g. pointing out a mistake in something that promotes a near-term AGI narrative.
If you want to express mainstream North American liberal/​progressive views on social justice-related topics, forget about it. The downvotes will fall like a cloud of daggers. (The Overton window of the EA Forum is a bit skewed in that regard — and it’s extremely skewed for the LessWrong users who come over here — where some people will defend views they concede are or might be offensive and wrong, such as scientific racism or white nationalism, on the grounds of free speech or neutrality or intellectual freedom or whatever, but do not extend the same defense to the sort of bog standard social justice views that mainstream liberal or progressive politicians or academics generally affirm. I think Kamala Harris or Barack Obama might get downvoted on the EA Forum talking about systemic racism, sexism, or trans rights in the ways they already do in public appearances, and an authoritarian white nationalist like Curtis Yarvin — who many people on LessWrong seem to be a fan of — might get upvoted for some edgy take about Black-on-Black crime or race and IQ or something.)
I find the ways that I see people on the EA Forum circle the wagons around near-term AGI and social justice quite demented — sorry to be so blunt. Someone can make a post that says we should try to contact aliens to warn them about AGI and that gets +27 karma, but if you point out someone used a term from machine learning incorrectly that gets 0 or negative karma, and if you get into arguments about social justice you will get negative karma about the half the time, seemingly regardless of what you say (at least, I can’t figure out the pattern, if there is one). It just seems like if you are willing to entertain really strange ideas like the aliens thing, you should also be willing to entertain mainstream ideas that many experts endorse — I mean specifically things that don’t go against EA’s core principles and haven’t been discussed to death already, about which there isn’t already a consensus within the community.
I guess it doesn’t surprise me that people might knee-jerk downvote entirely reasonable comments about the limited market potential for humane insecticides or things of that nature, since that’s similar. Maybe it’s an example of in-group polarization, where people want to fiercely defend an opinion that’s extreme relative to the general population or out-group.