There may be perfectly good, if formally invalid, reasons people assume that negative evaluators are smarter.

When I first started following science and politics blogging, I was surprised how much came down to blogger-vs.-blogger disputes you’d never know about if you hadn’t been reading a while (not “crush the theists” but “crush someone I disagree slightly with”).

By now, we probably need a Who’s Who of Science Blogging just to keep track of who has had a tiff with whom. Something like 780 science blogs means, let me see, about three hundred thousand possible pairwise interactions, assuming that Alice’s opinion of Bob is the same as Bob’s opinion about Alice, a symmetry assumption which might not be valid.

I’ve found myself tempted to comment about nitpicking disagreements, and more tempted to comment when I had them, even when I agreed overall with a post. I think it’s partly because seeing something you disagree with immediately gets your attention and provides the motivation and “plot” for the comment: here, briefly, is a point you made; here’s my alternative theory; here’s why mine r0×0rs or your sux0rs.

Coming up with interesting comments on something you agree with may take more initiative (you have to think of extra evidence supporting their point, a funny joke, a related topic, or whatever). Much as it takes more initiative (and elbow grease) to create or add to a Wikipedia article than to correct one.

I suspect some of the negativity on the Interwebs comes from a more primitive place than that — somebody was cool enough to write this novel, write about Win32 debugging techniques, make this YouTube video, etc., and dashing off a quick “U SUK!!” or a well-argued rebuttal makes some folks feel a bit better than them. Both when it’s the kind of negativity that tends to make one look clever and competent and when it’s not.

In that spirit:

Discussion of Geoffrey Pullam’s examination of Brown would not be complete without…

Would too be complete!!1one :)