Note that one of the desiderata I’d prefer out of this is “positive votes actually mean ‘I liked this post’ and negative votes actually mean ‘I disliked this post’ as opposed to ‘I strategically voted this number to have a cumulative effect across my overall votes’”.
(This isn’t crucial but it does make the swarmplots more intuitive to read)
There’s frequently a tradeoff between “less strategic incentives” and “more-intelligible under honesty”. I don’t think that you should pick the former every time, but it is certainly better to err a little bit on the side of the former and get good-but-slightly-more-confusing results, than to err on the side of the latter and get results that are neither good nor intelligible (because strategic voting has ruined that, too).
I agree, just looking for Pareto improvements if they exist (since we didn’t try much at all this year for them, it seemed plausible such things existed)
Put a cap on the variance (standard deviation squared) of votes, rather than the sum-squared of votes? That would be equivalent to subtracting the mean from each vote …
(Maybe you have to count the zero votes in the calculation)
Still seems fairly confusing to me. Like, the act of futzing around with your vote totals shouldn’t give you the (temporary) impression that you can get more points in a way that can’t actually get you more points.
Just renormalize votes to be mean-0 before scaling.
Note that one of the desiderata I’d prefer out of this is “positive votes actually mean ‘I liked this post’ and negative votes actually mean ‘I disliked this post’ as opposed to ‘I strategically voted this number to have a cumulative effect across my overall votes’”.
(This isn’t crucial but it does make the swarmplots more intuitive to read)
There’s frequently a tradeoff between “less strategic incentives” and “more-intelligible under honesty”. I don’t think that you should pick the former every time, but it is certainly better to err a little bit on the side of the former and get good-but-slightly-more-confusing results, than to err on the side of the latter and get results that are neither good nor intelligible (because strategic voting has ruined that, too).
I agree, just looking for Pareto improvements if they exist (since we didn’t try much at all this year for them, it seemed plausible such things existed)
Put a cap on the variance (standard deviation squared) of votes, rather than the sum-squared of votes? That would be equivalent to subtracting the mean from each vote …
(Maybe you have to count the zero votes in the calculation)
Will that be obvious while the person is voting? (I guess this may be more of a UI question than a voting-theory question)
I can imagine, similar to how we have a button for ‘re-order the posts’, we could have a button for ‘normalise my votes’.
Still seems fairly confusing to me. Like, the act of futzing around with your vote totals shouldn’t give you the (temporary) impression that you can get more points in a way that can’t actually get you more points.
The whole point is that it does give you more points, I think.