Ok, I really don’t get why my post announcing my book got downvoted (ignored is one thing, downvoted quite another)...
Update: when I made this post the announcement post was on 5 Karma and out of the frontpage. Now it’s 15 Karma, which is about what I expected it to get, given that it’s not a core topic of LW and doesn’t have a lot of information (though I now added some more information at the end), so I’m happy. Just a bit of a bummer that I had to make this post to get the original post out of the pit of obscurity it was pushed into by noise.
The post is an advertisement, without other content. I think a post of that type should only be on the site if it comes with some meat—an excerpt, at least. (And even then I’m not sure). The reader can’t even look up or read the book yet if he wanted to!
(There is a quote of the thesis of the book, but the text is stuff I’ve been rereading for years now. It feels like someone is always telling me liberalism is under threat recently.)
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been writing it for a year already without talking about it much publicly, and wanted to put it out there so people know what I’m doing. I see it similarly to the updates people give here on their research agendas or work they intend to do. I agree that for LW (but not for twitter, for which this was originally written) it’s probably good to put more meat and give more detail about what the book will discuss. Maybe I’ll edit it in.
Edit: I added a list at the end of the post of things I plan to discuss or look into
Sorry to hear about that experience. I think that “downvote” should be a power you unlock when you’re well-established on LW (maybe at 1k karma or so) rather than being universally available. The sting of a downvote on something you think is important is easily 50x the reward of an upvote, and giving that power to people who have little context on the community seems very bad EV.
Especially with LW becoming more in the public eye, letting random internetgoers who register give any LWer negative feedback (which is often painful/discouraging) seems pretty likely to be detrimental. I’d be interested in takes from the LW team on this.
Edit: Man, I love the disagree vote separation. It’s nice people being able to disagree with me without downvoting.
I think this would train the wrong habits in LessWrong users, and also skew the incentive landscape that is already tilted somewhat too much in the direction of “you get karma if you post content” away from “you get karma if your content on average makes the site better”.
hmm, I both see the incentive issue and also that the current widespread downvote marginally mitigates this. Not sure if it helps a lot to have lurker downvotes, and expect there are notable costs. Do you think there is a karma bar below which the EV of a downvote from those users is negative? My guess is at least totally new users add painful noise in a net negative way often enough that their contribution to keeping things bad things low is not worthwhile, and pushes away some good contributors lowering average quality.
I suspect you might be underestimating the how much some users take a psychological hit if they put effort into something and get slapped down without comment, having those be somewhat reliably not misfiring seems important.
(this is probably fairly minor on your list of things, no worries if you disengage)
I think it’s a hard tradeoff. I do think lots of people take psychological hits, but it is also genuinely important that people who are not a good fit for the site learn quickly and get the hint that they either have to shape up or get out. Otherwise we are at risk of quickly deteroriating in discussion quality. I do think this still makes it valuable to reduce variance, but I think we’ve already largely done that with the strong-vote and vote-weighting system.
Upvotes by senior users matter a lot more, and any senior user can you dig you out of multiple junior users downvoting you, which helps.
I think making downvotes completely unavailable beneath a certain karma level wouldn’t be good.
But also I think the outsized effects of downvotes is strongest when it’s one of the first votes, (as it was) rather than when it’s one among many votes, because it also makes the post disappear from the front page and takes away from it the chance to get more votes. upvotes don’t do that, because they make the post stay longer on the frontpage, so it can always later gain more downvotes by new people getting exposed to it.
So if we do limit the power of downvotes or who can cast them, perhaps it should be focused on early votes, and not votes in general?
I would need more data to make an opinion on this.
At first sight, it seems to me like having a rule “if your total karma is less than 100, you are not allowed to downvote an article or a comment if doing so would push it under zero” would be good.
But I have no idea how often that happens in real life. Do we actually have many readers with karma below 100 who bother to vote?
By the way, I didn’t vote on your article, but… you announced that you were writing a book i.e. it is not even finished, you didn’t provide a free chapter or something… so what exactly was there to upvote you for?
(Sorry, this is too blunt, and I understand that people need some positive reinforcement along the way. But this is not a general website to make people feel good; unfortunately, aspiring rationalists are a tiny fraction of the general population, so making this website more welcoming to the general population would get us hopelessly diluted. Also, there is a soft taboo on politics, which your post was kinda about, without providing something substantial to justify that.)
I don’t know either! Early voting is often quite noisy, and this thing is a bit politics-adjacent. I expect it won’t end up downvoted too long. I’ve considered hiding vote-scores for the first few hours, but we do ultimately still have to use something for visibility calculations, and I don’t like withholding information from users.
I think there’s an asymmetry problem here. An early downvote hides the post from the frontpage and impedes it from getting more evaluations, so it’s a pit that’s hard to get out from (without, say, creating a different post asking why your first post is in the pit :P). An early upvote, on the other hand, exposes the post to more evaluations by keeping it longer on the frontpage, and it’s easy for later downvotes to push it back down, so it’s more like a slippery hill than a pit.
So I think a mechanism that would avoid premature burials of posts would overcome some of the noise and lead to more information being incorporated into the “final” evaluation of the post (the karma it stabilizes on).
I agree this is true for content by new users, but honestly, we kind of need to hide content from most users from the frontpage until someone decided to upvote it.
For more active users, their strong-vote strength gets applied by default to the post, which helps a good amount with early downvotes not hurting visibility that much.
I don’t think that’s enough? I have 3.5k Karma, which gives me a strong vote power of 7, but when I made this post the other post was on 5 Karma and long gone from the front page. It only started gaining karma and came back to the frontpage after I made this post.
And I kinda dislike “why am I getting downvoted” posts, so I would like mechanisms that make them unnecessary.
I mean, the difference between 7 and 5 karma on frontpage ranking is miniscule, so I don’t think that made any difference. The real question is “why did nobody upvote it”? Like, I think there physically isn’t enough space on the frontpage to give 5 karma posts visibility for very long, without filling most of the frontpage with new unvetted content.
I don’t think comparing 5 to 7 is correct, because we don’t want to compare to downvote to no-vote, we want to compare one ordering of votes to another ordering of votes. So, what would be the difference if it went up before it went back down again, rather than first go down like it has.
I think we do agree that if I didn’t ask why it was downvoted it would have remained at 5 rather than go up to 15, and that this is suboptimal, right?
To me it feels like mid-popularity posts are affected too much by noise and when they get posted.
I do feel like it would be good to start with a more optimistic prior on new posts. Over the last year, the mean post karma was a little over 13, and the median was 5.
LW has been avoiding all discussion of politics in the runup to the election. And it usually is suspicious of politics, noting that “politics is the mindkiller” that causes arguments and division of rationalist communities.
Thus it could be argued that it’s an inappropriate place to announce your book, even though it’s intended as a rationalist take on politics and not strictly partisan.
But it’s a judgment call. Which is why your post is now positive again.
I’m uncertain; I would neither downvote nor upvoted your post. I certainly wouldn’t discuss the theory here, but announcing it seems fine.
I’m not sure where the requests RE political discussion are stated. The site FAQ is one place but I don’t think that says much.
It seems contradictory. If LW users believe that the userbase is not competent enough on average to avoid tangential but divisive politics, then why do they believe the ’karma’ average decided by the same, matters?
It’s like a superposition of two extremes:
At one extreme there’s Reddit where a high karma is more of an anti-signal, and having extra karma beyond a pretty low threshold actually increase reader’s suspicions that it’s fluff or unusually deceiving…
At the other extreme, there are traditional old BBS forums with no karma or scoring system whatsoever. And any formal distinction is a huge positive signal.
It’s more that any platform that allows discussion of politics risks becoming a platform that is almost exclusively about politics. Upvoting is a signal of “I want to see more of this content”, while downvoting is a signal of “I want to see less of this content”. So “I will downvote any posts that are about politics or politics-adjacent, because I like this website and would be sad if it turned into yet another politics forum” is a coherent position.
All that said, I also did not vote on the above post.
We believe politics is the mind killer. That is separate from a judgment about user competence. There is no contradiction. Even competent users have emotions and bises, and politics is a common hot button.
Reddit is a flaming mess compared to LW, so the mods here are doing something right—probably a lot.
Sometimes politics IS the core issue, or at least an important underlying cause of the core issue, so a blanket ban on discussing it is a very crude tool.
Because it’s effectively banning any substantial discussion on a wide range of topics, and instead replacing it, at best, with a huge pile of euphemisms and seemingly bizarre back and forths. And at worst, nothing at all.
So user competence as a factor is unlikely to be completely seperate.
Or to look at it from the other angle, in an ideal world with ideal forum participants, there would very likely be a different prevailing norm.
Once you take into account real world factors, such as an expanding userbase leading to less average credibility per user, multiplying political positions, etc… which are all pretty much unavoidable due to regression to the mean…
It really becomes ever closer to an effective blanket ban, to at least try to maintain the same average quality. (Asssuming that is a goal.)
To extrapolate it to an extreme scenario, if the userbase suddenly 100X in size, then even many things considered prosaic might have to be prohibited because the userbase, on average, literally wouldn’t be capable of evaluating discussion beyond a mediocore subreddit otherwise.
Ok, I really don’t get why my post announcing my book got downvoted (ignored is one thing, downvoted quite another)...
Update: when I made this post the announcement post was on 5 Karma and out of the frontpage. Now it’s 15 Karma, which is about what I expected it to get, given that it’s not a core topic of LW and doesn’t have a lot of information (though I now added some more information at the end), so I’m happy. Just a bit of a bummer that I had to make this post to get the original post out of the pit of obscurity it was pushed into by noise.
The post is an advertisement, without other content. I think a post of that type should only be on the site if it comes with some meat—an excerpt, at least. (And even then I’m not sure). The reader can’t even look up or read the book yet if he wanted to!
(There is a quote of the thesis of the book, but the text is stuff I’ve been rereading for years now. It feels like someone is always telling me liberalism is under threat recently.)
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been writing it for a year already without talking about it much publicly, and wanted to put it out there so people know what I’m doing. I see it similarly to the updates people give here on their research agendas or work they intend to do. I agree that for LW (but not for twitter, for which this was originally written) it’s probably good to put more meat and give more detail about what the book will discuss. Maybe I’ll edit it in.
Edit: I added a list at the end of the post of things I plan to discuss or look into
Sorry to hear about that experience. I think that “downvote” should be a power you unlock when you’re well-established on LW (maybe at 1k karma or so) rather than being universally available. The sting of a downvote on something you think is important is easily 50x the reward of an upvote, and giving that power to people who have little context on the community seems very bad EV.
Especially with LW becoming more in the public eye, letting random internetgoers who register give any LWer negative feedback (which is often painful/discouraging) seems pretty likely to be detrimental. I’d be interested in takes from the LW team on this.
Edit: Man, I love the disagree vote separation. It’s nice people being able to disagree with me without downvoting.
I think this would train the wrong habits in LessWrong users, and also skew the incentive landscape that is already tilted somewhat too much in the direction of “you get karma if you post content” away from “you get karma if your content on average makes the site better”.
hmm, I both see the incentive issue and also that the current widespread downvote marginally mitigates this. Not sure if it helps a lot to have lurker downvotes, and expect there are notable costs. Do you think there is a karma bar below which the EV of a downvote from those users is negative? My guess is at least totally new users add painful noise in a net negative way often enough that their contribution to keeping things bad things low is not worthwhile, and pushes away some good contributors lowering average quality.
I suspect you might be underestimating the how much some users take a psychological hit if they put effort into something and get slapped down without comment, having those be somewhat reliably not misfiring seems important.
(this is probably fairly minor on your list of things, no worries if you disengage)
I think it’s a hard tradeoff. I do think lots of people take psychological hits, but it is also genuinely important that people who are not a good fit for the site learn quickly and get the hint that they either have to shape up or get out. Otherwise we are at risk of quickly deteroriating in discussion quality. I do think this still makes it valuable to reduce variance, but I think we’ve already largely done that with the strong-vote and vote-weighting system.
Upvotes by senior users matter a lot more, and any senior user can you dig you out of multiple junior users downvoting you, which helps.
I think making downvotes completely unavailable beneath a certain karma level wouldn’t be good.
But also I think the outsized effects of downvotes is strongest when it’s one of the first votes, (as it was) rather than when it’s one among many votes, because it also makes the post disappear from the front page and takes away from it the chance to get more votes. upvotes don’t do that, because they make the post stay longer on the frontpage, so it can always later gain more downvotes by new people getting exposed to it.
So if we do limit the power of downvotes or who can cast them, perhaps it should be focused on early votes, and not votes in general?
I would need more data to make an opinion on this.
At first sight, it seems to me like having a rule “if your total karma is less than 100, you are not allowed to downvote an article or a comment if doing so would push it under zero” would be good.
But I have no idea how often that happens in real life. Do we actually have many readers with karma below 100 who bother to vote?
By the way, I didn’t vote on your article, but… you announced that you were writing a book i.e. it is not even finished, you didn’t provide a free chapter or something… so what exactly was there to upvote you for?
(Sorry, this is too blunt, and I understand that people need some positive reinforcement along the way. But this is not a general website to make people feel good; unfortunately, aspiring rationalists are a tiny fraction of the general population, so making this website more welcoming to the general population would get us hopelessly diluted. Also, there is a soft taboo on politics, which your post was kinda about, without providing something substantial to justify that.)
I don’t know either! Early voting is often quite noisy, and this thing is a bit politics-adjacent. I expect it won’t end up downvoted too long. I’ve considered hiding vote-scores for the first few hours, but we do ultimately still have to use something for visibility calculations, and I don’t like withholding information from users.
I think there’s an asymmetry problem here. An early downvote hides the post from the frontpage and impedes it from getting more evaluations, so it’s a pit that’s hard to get out from (without, say, creating a different post asking why your first post is in the pit :P). An early upvote, on the other hand, exposes the post to more evaluations by keeping it longer on the frontpage, and it’s easy for later downvotes to push it back down, so it’s more like a slippery hill than a pit.
So I think a mechanism that would avoid premature burials of posts would overcome some of the noise and lead to more information being incorporated into the “final” evaluation of the post (the karma it stabilizes on).
I agree this is true for content by new users, but honestly, we kind of need to hide content from most users from the frontpage until someone decided to upvote it.
For more active users, their strong-vote strength gets applied by default to the post, which helps a good amount with early downvotes not hurting visibility that much.
I don’t think that’s enough? I have 3.5k Karma, which gives me a strong vote power of 7, but when I made this post the other post was on 5 Karma and long gone from the front page. It only started gaining karma and came back to the frontpage after I made this post.
And I kinda dislike “why am I getting downvoted” posts, so I would like mechanisms that make them unnecessary.
I mean, the difference between 7 and 5 karma on frontpage ranking is miniscule, so I don’t think that made any difference. The real question is “why did nobody upvote it”? Like, I think there physically isn’t enough space on the frontpage to give 5 karma posts visibility for very long, without filling most of the frontpage with new unvetted content.
I don’t think comparing 5 to 7 is correct, because we don’t want to compare to downvote to no-vote, we want to compare one ordering of votes to another ordering of votes. So, what would be the difference if it went up before it went back down again, rather than first go down like it has.
I think we do agree that if I didn’t ask why it was downvoted it would have remained at 5 rather than go up to 15, and that this is suboptimal, right?
To me it feels like mid-popularity posts are affected too much by noise and when they get posted.
I do feel like it would be good to start with a more optimistic prior on new posts. Over the last year, the mean post karma was a little over 13, and the median was 5.
LW has been avoiding all discussion of politics in the runup to the election. And it usually is suspicious of politics, noting that “politics is the mindkiller” that causes arguments and division of rationalist communities.
Thus it could be argued that it’s an inappropriate place to announce your book, even though it’s intended as a rationalist take on politics and not strictly partisan.
But it’s a judgment call. Which is why your post is now positive again.
I’m uncertain; I would neither downvote nor upvoted your post. I certainly wouldn’t discuss the theory here, but announcing it seems fine.
I’m not sure where the requests RE political discussion are stated. The site FAQ is one place but I don’t think that says much.
It seems contradictory. If LW users believe that the userbase is not competent enough on average to avoid tangential but divisive politics, then why do they believe the ’karma’ average decided by the same, matters?
It’s like a superposition of two extremes:
At one extreme there’s Reddit where a high karma is more of an anti-signal, and having extra karma beyond a pretty low threshold actually increase reader’s suspicions that it’s fluff or unusually deceiving…
At the other extreme, there are traditional old BBS forums with no karma or scoring system whatsoever. And any formal distinction is a huge positive signal.
It’s more that any platform that allows discussion of politics risks becoming a platform that is almost exclusively about politics. Upvoting is a signal of “I want to see more of this content”, while downvoting is a signal of “I want to see less of this content”. So “I will downvote any posts that are about politics or politics-adjacent, because I like this website and would be sad if it turned into yet another politics forum” is a coherent position.
All that said, I also did not vote on the above post.
We believe politics is the mind killer. That is separate from a judgment about user competence. There is no contradiction. Even competent users have emotions and bises, and politics is a common hot button.
Reddit is a flaming mess compared to LW, so the mods here are doing something right—probably a lot.
Sometimes politics IS the core issue, or at least an important underlying cause of the core issue, so a blanket ban on discussing it is a very crude tool.
Because it’s effectively banning any substantial discussion on a wide range of topics, and instead replacing it, at best, with a huge pile of euphemisms and seemingly bizarre back and forths. And at worst, nothing at all.
So user competence as a factor is unlikely to be completely seperate.
Or to look at it from the other angle, in an ideal world with ideal forum participants, there would very likely be a different prevailing norm.
It’s not a blanket ban.
Of course user competence isn’t entirely separate, just mostly.
In a world with ideal forum participants, we wouldn’t be having this conversation :)
Once you take into account real world factors, such as an expanding userbase leading to less average credibility per user, multiplying political positions, etc… which are all pretty much unavoidable due to regression to the mean…
It really becomes ever closer to an effective blanket ban, to at least try to maintain the same average quality. (Asssuming that is a goal.)
To extrapolate it to an extreme scenario, if the userbase suddenly 100X in size, then even many things considered prosaic might have to be prohibited because the userbase, on average, literally wouldn’t be capable of evaluating discussion beyond a mediocore subreddit otherwise.