I’ll regard it, but I’m not sure what useful conclusions can be drawn from it. This seems like polarization bait that lets left-of-center types feel smug about how much smarter they are than conservatives, and right-of-center types can indulge in a good pity party about how biased those socialist Europeans are against conservatives. Something for everybody, accomplishing nothing. Who gives a fuck about who has the higher IQ? What has it to do with whether a persons actions are just or unjust? Even if we take for granted that IQ is a reasonable measure of intelligence, intelligent people are just as capable of doing terrible, selfish things.

Imagine a scenario where this same study was conducted but it found that conservative men had higher IQs. Same study, same methodological rigor, different result. How would your opinions or beliefs about the world change? Would you be inclined to think that maybe conservatives are perhaps going about things the right way, by virtue of this study? I would hope not. Even if we could measure intelligence, hell, if we could even define intelligence cogently and comprehensively, what impact should that have on our decision making? Are “smarter” people considered more right? Or should statements be evaluated on their individual merits, regardless of the quantified “smartness” of the person who said them?

I think it should be the latter. IQ is at best a curiosity and it should have no place in the evaluation of government or social policy. Thank you for coming to my soapbox harangue.

Caring about IQ is stupid even when it validates your preconceptions.

So instead of “I get like 8 emails a day” you would say “I get like 8 email a day”? Or would you say “I get like 8 email messages a day”?

or whom?

We are all Hungary, and it’s time to eat.

I think there are pros and cons. I like being able to sort by Hot or Top to see what everyone else is thinking about, but with comments I like to sort by Old and just see how the conversation unfolds in time.

oh lol.

I sometimes wish I could turn it off lol. I love games, and the way that social media gets gamified with upvotes and downvotes (and the way that humans respond to those game elements, or make up their own rules around those game elements) is endlessly fascinating to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over how fuckin weird the internet is.

I’ll take a stab at answering even though I am not one of the downvoters (I actually cannot see the downvotes so I’ll take your word that they’re there).

First, I struggle to see the relevant difference between “is pathetic” and “coming across as pathetic”. I’ll try to make an analogy: I think downvoting as it currently functions (at least for lemmy/piefed) is a summary judgement that says “this content is not worth my attention, nor is it worth everyone else’s attention.” I think your distinction tries to differentiate between those two things, i.e. “comes across as pathetic” implies “this is not worth my attention” while “is pathetic” implies “not worth anyone’s attention”, and the simple mechanism of downvoting is not nuanced enough for that distinction. I think the distaste for saying “asking about downvotes comes across as pathetic” stems from a disagreement about whether such questions are worth anyone’s attention, not merely your own.

Second, I think there’s an element of gamification to upvotes and downvotes that leads people to seek upvotes and avoid downvotes to the detriment of… what I’ll call for lack of a better term “actual conversation”. I think this is worse on platforms like Reddit where one’s global post and comment karma is easily accessible. We humans have an ingrained preference for “numbers going up” games that Reddit takes advantage of to boost its interaction metrics (and therefore its ad sales). This gamification leads to suspicion among users about the true motives behind inquiries about downvotes. If maximizing upvotes is the game we’re all playing, then demanding a clarification for downvotes might be taken as a cynical attempt to save points rather than actually engaging with a controversial idea, and I think that behavior is broadly agreed to be pathetic. But that cynical pointsmaxxing behavior often looks a lot like someone who is trying to engage with a controversial idea, indeed I think the whole concept of “concern trolling” relies on exploiting that ambiguity. I think the automatic assignment of any questioning of downvotes to “pathetic” (either seeming or in fact) excludes the possibility that the asker is making a good-faith attempt to learn why their post was received so negatively by the community.

I don’t think I would have had the self-awareness to turn them off myself, but since I have started using blahaj.zone (which disables downvotes by default) I have been very pleasantly surprised at what a difference it makes. It makes social media a lot less stressful and more fun to use, with AFAICT no significant downsides. It’s very nice.

JD’s going for the Catholicism any% WR.

I am a fan of the long comment, it is deeply appreciated ❤️

I too sometimes ask about downvotes on other people’s comments, but it feels a bit like bursting into a room and asking everyone to stop and take a survey so I try to be judicious about it. Usually it’s pretty self-explanatory but every so often I come across a real mystery.

“emails” as opposed to “e-mails”? That’s a new one to me, I’ve always assumed both are valid.

That’s so cool, I have never heard of such a thing. is it a written rule for the comm(s) or is it more of an unofficial custom?

The difference between the rules for downvotes and how they’re actually used by users is one of the things that brought this to mind. Some forums specifically forbid complaining about downvotes, but even in fora where such complaints aren’t specifically against the rules, they’re still generally frowned upon, and that is expressed in downvotes. It’s sort of like community rule enforcement: if enough people think a rule should be followed, they’ll make their opinion known, even if it’s not one of the written rules.

I love overthinking things. It’s almost definitionally more miss than hit, but every once in a while it really hits.

It’s actually since I created this account that I really started thinking about the role of downvoting in social media. I honestly do not miss it at all, I think turning them off makes the internet better. I recognize this is not true for everyone, and I think people who find downvotes useful deserve to have useful tools. But I do like that I have the option of not thinking about them.

It would be nice to have a distro with some basic flight control drivers preconfigured so we didn’t have to build from scratch for every airframe. Maybe wouldn’t get the same performance profile as proprietary drivers but something that could get off the ground. It could even be called AvioNix.

Curious to see if Super Meat Boy can pull off the jump to 3D. The original was fantastic but it’s a hard transition even for talented devs.