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"This is reasonable and illuminates something interesting, but I don't agree with it" is pretty widely considered a poor excuse for downvotes without comment, l

"This is reasonable and illuminates something interesting, but I don't agree with it" is pretty widely considered a poor excuse for downvotes without comment, let alone flagging. You're obviously free to downvote whatever you want, but behaving like that is explicitly making this a meaner, dumber, less interesting place.

Tainnor 5y ago
I should have quoted only the latter part of your sentence. I disagree that it's an illuminating comment or that the reasoning behind it is strong. And in particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same category as "most reasonable people consider this to be immoral" (you can question whether we have the same definition for "reasonable", but at some point you'll have to recognise that we all make some decision at some point as to what we consider reasonable or not). That said, I didn't actually downvote it, I just gave some argument for why I think the downvote was justified.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > in particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same category as "most reasonable people consider this to be immoral" IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history. If you want to hide[1] a potentially sincere groupthink simply because it doesn't comport with groupthink, there a million and one fora full of dumb, narrow-minded people you can do that on. HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide. This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss, but this is demonstrably untrue of the parent comment, as evidenced by my response to it and the half dozen people who found it interesting enough to upvote it. [1] Again, we're talking about flagging, not just downvoting, though it applies weakly to the latter too.
  - Tainnor 5y ago
    I agree that the flagging goes a bit too far. The downvote is entirely justified though. Downvoting for disagreement is explicitly allowed as per the site guidelines. Now myself I try not to overuse that, but if I really believe that I can't follow or agree with the reasoning behind something at all and I find it somehow disturbing, yeah, then there's nothing wrong with downvoting. > IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history. Your solution to the fallibility of human judgment, especially when it comes to ethics, is to assume that there can be no moral judgement anymore, because one might be wrong. I don't think this is productive. I'm quite sure there are a number of things you would consider deeply immoral that you would be shocked to read here. People are allowed to have a sense of ethics and to use that to guide downvotes. If you disagree, just upvote instead, or discuss why you disagree. But you yourself admitted that most people would find the behaviour in question immoral. > HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide. Your mistake is to assume that HN is somehow above basic human nature. But HN is also full of explicit and implicit biases and those can often hide behind a veneer of supposed rationality. > This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss I found your contribution to the debate to be actually sort of interesting, but more as an answer to a question such as "how can we explain why we find that sort of behaviour to be immoral" and not to the OP's implicit "I fail to see what's immoral here". Also, it was just in a sense a low-effort comment. I'm sure that poster can perfectly well understand why someone would find the behaviour in question immoral given that that person presumably has spent time around other people, including women who might object to this kind of objectification. So if they still disagree that it is immoral, they could at least try to argue why. (Also, the sole reason why I'm engaging you, as opposed to OP, here is because I find these sorts of meta-ethics / meta-rationality discussions to be quite interesting and important in a world where "reasonable people" seem to be less and less able to agree on how to ascertain both what is true and what is moral. This is, I think, a discussion worth having, I just happen to disagree with your conclusions.)
    - 5y ago

Tainnor 5y ago

I should have quoted only the latter part of your sentence. I disagree that it's an illuminating comment or that the reasoning behind it is strong. And in particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same category as "most reasonable people consider this to be immoral" (you can question whether we have the same definition for "reasonable", but at some point you'll have to recognise that we all make some decision at some point as to what we consider reasonable or not). That said, I didn't actually downvote it, I just gave some argument for why I think the downvote was justified.

wutbrodo 5y ago
> in particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same category as "most reasonable people consider this to be immoral" IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history. If you want to hide[1] a potentially sincere groupthink simply because it doesn't comport with groupthink, there a million and one fora full of dumb, narrow-minded people you can do that on. HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide. This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss, but this is demonstrably untrue of the parent comment, as evidenced by my response to it and the half dozen people who found it interesting enough to upvote it. [1] Again, we're talking about flagging, not just downvoting, though it applies weakly to the latter too.
- Tainnor 5y ago
  I agree that the flagging goes a bit too far. The downvote is entirely justified though. Downvoting for disagreement is explicitly allowed as per the site guidelines. Now myself I try not to overuse that, but if I really believe that I can't follow or agree with the reasoning behind something at all and I find it somehow disturbing, yeah, then there's nothing wrong with downvoting. > IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history. Your solution to the fallibility of human judgment, especially when it comes to ethics, is to assume that there can be no moral judgement anymore, because one might be wrong. I don't think this is productive. I'm quite sure there are a number of things you would consider deeply immoral that you would be shocked to read here. People are allowed to have a sense of ethics and to use that to guide downvotes. If you disagree, just upvote instead, or discuss why you disagree. But you yourself admitted that most people would find the behaviour in question immoral. > HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide. Your mistake is to assume that HN is somehow above basic human nature. But HN is also full of explicit and implicit biases and those can often hide behind a veneer of supposed rationality. > This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss I found your contribution to the debate to be actually sort of interesting, but more as an answer to a question such as "how can we explain why we find that sort of behaviour to be immoral" and not to the OP's implicit "I fail to see what's immoral here". Also, it was just in a sense a low-effort comment. I'm sure that poster can perfectly well understand why someone would find the behaviour in question immoral given that that person presumably has spent time around other people, including women who might object to this kind of objectification. So if they still disagree that it is immoral, they could at least try to argue why. (Also, the sole reason why I'm engaging you, as opposed to OP, here is because I find these sorts of meta-ethics / meta-rationality discussions to be quite interesting and important in a world where "reasonable people" seem to be less and less able to agree on how to ascertain both what is true and what is moral. This is, I think, a discussion worth having, I just happen to disagree with your conclusions.)
  - 5y ago