[pjc50]

> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.

That depends on how wrong they are. There's plenty of fringe lunacy that's wrong but you could spend all your life uselessly rebutting. Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

In this context, downvote is basically an eyeroll.

[philh]

> Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

Here we see one problem with downvoting lunacy: some people notice it where it doesn't exist, and others fail to see it where it does.

I'm not ancap myself, but I think the movement deserves respect; for example, I've not read The Machinery of Freedom, but I've heard good things about it, and I don't think you can dismiss it as fringe lunacy.

Chemtrails, though? Obviously dumb.

[pjc50]

"Lunacy" more as a modality of discussion than a property of the ideas themselves. Usually involving taking the ideas as dogma and failing to think about practical application or relevance to the particular subject under discussion.

Another example: Marx wrote a lot of reasonable analysis of the mid-19th-century economic condition (and some bad analysis). Marxists tend to be tremendously irritating write-only dogmatists. It doesn't have to be that way. The right has a similar bunch of people who are Friedman dogmatists.