A brief guide to not getting downvoted

post by nhamann · 2010-10-30T02:32:53.517Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 2 comments

Contents

  1.  Map and territory
  2. Words are tricky
  3. Taboo your words!
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2 comments

Important Question: does a guide like this already exist? I couldn't find one, but it's hard to believe there's no guide to not getting downvoted...Supposing there isn't, please give me suggestions on what such a guide needs, because I'm sort of just guessing here.

Edit: Found Your intuititions are not magic, which might be most of what I had intended to write about.

 

 

In this recent discussion post, new user draq points out that while their discussion posts have been substantially downvoted, they largely does not know why or what is wrong with these posts. I want to offer a few suggestions why a new user might find their posts being downvoted, but I should first note that many of the participants here have read a substantial portion of the sequences. This is the reason why you will occasionally see jargon-sounding terminology being used. Every so often a new (usually argumentative) user will come along and levy the charge of "groupthink" at LW, but this is merely a case of a group of people with shared knowledge/beliefs inventing shorthand for those ideas. To fully interact with the community here, you will unfortunately need to go through at least a good portion of the core sequences. Onto the troubleshooting:

 

1.  Map and territory

Here at LW, the dominant metaphor for talking about the nature of beliefs is as a map-territory relation. The essence of this idea can be summarized as follows:

• territory = The Universe
• map = your beliefs

There are important omissions here, like defining "The Universe," but I'm not a specialist in these issues and that's not the point anyways. The point is we have to start somewhere, and that place is the idea that there's a universe and you and I and everyone else live there.

It's important to note that your beliefs about the world exist only in your head, and they aren't very useful at all if they don't correspond to something that we can verify through observation. That's why the only useful kind of beliefs are those that make you anticipate the world being in some set of states and not in others. For example, if I believe that "consciousness is emergent," yet I have no idea what would change in the world if "consciousness" were not "emergent," then I really don't have a belief about anything at all; I just have a bunch of words strung together that seem to refer to something. Which brings us to the next point:

 

2. Words are tricky

You may be suffering from the illusion that people can understand what you mean. If you have done a great deal of thinking on your own, you may find that some of the words you use conceal all sorts of different meanings that others might not share. You should be wary of all the ways that words can confuse your thinking.

 

3. Taboo your words!

There's a delightful game we like to play here, and it's called Rationalist taboo. Essentially, when we find ourselves disagreeing with one another and the source of conflict can't be easily found, it's typically the case that someone has an extra clump of meaning attached to one of their words that the other participant didn't have. Tabooing key words is an extremely powerful method for resolving arguments and for debugging your own thinking.

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