Irrational Upvotes

Umm, notice the way zhe capitalises "VERY" just as you did?

Zhir post makes the point that your point was unsupported and non-obvious. If a premise is unsupported it shouldn't be used. That is obvious; else you wouldn't demand that zhe support ZHIR point.

Now, I don't think his post is deserving of an upvote, but it does contain content.

And by posting this to the discussion section you are trying to create a villifying discussion against a comment that disagrees with you.

In future, if you feel that there is some form of irrationality around, look for examples that don't involve you before posting, so that you don't seem to be simply lashing out.

I'd be interested to see examples where you agree with the comment but still feel the upvotes are irrational.

I wouldn't pay too much attention to the details of upvoting and downvoting - karma works as a rough filter for comment quality, but it has it's flaws, and paying more attention to karma doesn't reduce those flaws. So as a general rule, I don't get too worked up about what gets upvoted and what gets downvoted, unless I see a really unhealthy pattern (which I haven't seen yet).

In this specific case, I don't see a big problem - wedfrid points out what he sees as the biggest flaw in your reasoning, and the upvoters (which don't include me) probably agreed that that was a big flaw without needing any extra explanation (and I agree).

If you say "X is true, therefore blablabla", and most people would tend to believe that X is false, it seems reasonable to attract attention on that point - not necessarily providing a proof of non-X, but just pointing out "hey you're taking as a premise something most people here would disagree with, couldn't you at least give a bit more reasons for that?".

Yes, he didn't phrase it as politely, but your EXCESSIVE use of SHOUTING doesn't exactly encourage polite answers.

"This premise is VERY flawed"

This is a statement that can be made about any premise. It is backed by no supporting evidence.

A statement needs to be backed by arguments if that's necessary to make people agree with it. Some statements people already agree with, in which case no supporting arguments are necessary. Not every premise is such that people already agree with a statement that it's "very flawed".

Of course it's a bad argument when considered as directed to you (because it fails to move your beliefs), but a good one when seen as directed to other readers.

The value provided by wedrifid to the community was to mark one of your ideas as flawed. With his reputation on this site, that assessment is given weight. Even without additional support the value of his comment stands.

I generally don't trust karma systems on discussion/comment sites, period. They seem to tend over time to get subverted into one of several different failure modes:

• Enforcement of group-think
• Status games unrelated to site/discussion content
• Mechanical manipulation of karma thresholds for the lulz ^W ^W trolling purposes

I was going to mention examples of each from other sites, but decided that that wasn't very useful, because it would require familiarity with those sites, and possibly inspire quibbling over particular cases. I haven't been around Less Wrong long enough to observe how well it works here.