Is it ok to down vote an answer because you disagree with something it said?

Question

Is it ok to down vote an answer because you disagree with something it said?

I assumed it was, and that people were up voting because they agree with something it says.

Answer 1

This very question has been asked many times over. Some good answers can be found here.

Ultimately, it is a fact of StackExchange that votes are often based on bias. They should, ideally, be based on how well the questions and answers meet the expectations towards posts here as expressed in the help center and this meta.

When speaking about extreme cases (both extremely good and extremely bad) the voting mechanism works reasonably well though, and arguably better than any conceivable alternative. It would work better if we had more active voters because the bias of few people can tip the scale quite heavily but that's just where we're at.

Answer 2

In an ideal world, a well informed evaluation of a post would hinge on objective criteria of evaluation like:

• Does it answer the question?
• Is the response clear?
• Are there references and citations to appropriate sources?
• Are there factual errors?

In practice, many contributors to this site have radically different conceptions of philosophy and how to vote, and have difficulty distinguishing between what is accepted as a consensus in major philosophy communities, and what they believe philosophy should be. Hence, questions and answers that ask and answer questions about the philosophy of sexuality (IEP), for instance, will be downvoted and closed, despite:

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and other tertiary references having articles
• PhilPapers having links to arguments
• Philosophical books listed on Google books which are obviously high-quality publications by professional philosophers.
• Citations from the sources above that are clear, and obviously answer a question.

So, the limp and flimsy voting that happens on this forum seems to often move along the lines of:

• I reject all answers but my own
• I don't like you
• You said something I diagree with
• I don't understand your answer, so you don't know what you're talking about
• I disagree with your Weltanschauung
• I hate Wikipedia and I'm really smart
• I read a philosophy book once and this doesn't make sense

This is evidenced particularly by the fact that much downvoting occurs without commentary, and often it's plain to see that people who disagree with you will frequently downvote your answers after being challenged.

There's a lot of knowledge on this site, and many knowledgeable people, but the calculus of upvoting and downvoting on this site is not governable by prescription or norms, plain and simple, and so strictly speaking if you confine your activity to voting, you are governed only by your conscience. The truth is if you were to use a d6 and downvote on 1, and upvote on all other outcomes, no one would know, and no one would stop you. Any representation to the contrary of this fact about this forum would be misguided.