It wouldn’t have mattered to me whose name was in the title of that post, the strong-downvote button floated nearer to me just from reading the rest of the title.
From reading omnizoid’s blog, he seems overconfident in all his opinions. Even when changing them, the new opinion is always a revelation of truth, relegating his previously confident opinion to the follies of youth, and the person who bumped him into the change is always brilliant.
“It wouldn’t have mattered to me whose name was in the title of that post, the strong-downvote button floated nearer to me just from reading the rest of the title.”
I think this is right from an individual user perspective, but misses part of the dynamic. My impression from reading lesswrong posts is that something like that post, had the topic been different, maybe “Jesus was often incredibly wrong about stuff”, would have been ignored by many people. It would maybe have had between zero and a dozen karma and clearly not been clicked on by many people.
But that post, in some sense, was more successful than ones that are ignored—it managed to get people to read it (which is a necessary first step of communicating anything). That it has evidently failed in the second step (persuading people) is clear from the votes.
In a sense maybe this is the system working as intended: stuff that people just ignore doesn’t need downvoting because it doesn’t waste much communication bandwidth. Where as stuff that catches attention then disapoints is where the algorithm can maybe do people a favour with downvote data. But the way that system feeds into the users posting rights seems a little weird.
There are plenty of people on LessWrong who are overconfident in all their opionions (or maybe write as if they are, as a misguided rhetorical choice?). It is probably a selection effect of people who appreciate the sequences—whatever you think of his accuracy record, EY definitely writes as if he’s always very confident in his conclusions.
Whatever the reason, (rhetorical) overconfidence is most often seen here as a venial sin, as long as you bring decently-reasoned arguments and are willing to change your mind in response to other’s. Maybe it’s not your case, but I’m sure many would have been lighter with their downvotes had the topic been another one—just a few people strong downvoting instead of simple downvoting can change the karma balance quite a bit
It wouldn’t have mattered to me whose name was in the title of that post, the strong-downvote button floated nearer to me just from reading the rest of the title.
From reading omnizoid’s blog, he seems overconfident in all his opinions. Even when changing them, the new opinion is always a revelation of truth, relegating his previously confident opinion to the follies of youth, and the person who bumped him into the change is always brilliant.
“It wouldn’t have mattered to me whose name was in the title of that post, the strong-downvote button floated nearer to me just from reading the rest of the title.”
I think this is right from an individual user perspective, but misses part of the dynamic. My impression from reading lesswrong posts is that something like that post, had the topic been different, maybe “Jesus was often incredibly wrong about stuff”, would have been ignored by many people. It would maybe have had between zero and a dozen karma and clearly not been clicked on by many people.
But that post, in some sense, was more successful than ones that are ignored—it managed to get people to read it (which is a necessary first step of communicating anything). That it has evidently failed in the second step (persuading people) is clear from the votes.
In a sense maybe this is the system working as intended: stuff that people just ignore doesn’t need downvoting because it doesn’t waste much communication bandwidth. Where as stuff that catches attention then disapoints is where the algorithm can maybe do people a favour with downvote data. But the way that system feeds into the users posting rights seems a little weird.
There are plenty of people on LessWrong who are overconfident in all their opionions (or maybe write as if they are, as a misguided rhetorical choice?). It is probably a selection effect of people who appreciate the sequences—whatever you think of his accuracy record, EY definitely writes as if he’s always very confident in his conclusions.
Whatever the reason, (rhetorical) overconfidence is most often seen here as a venial sin, as long as you bring decently-reasoned arguments and are willing to change your mind in response to other’s. Maybe it’s not your case, but I’m sure many would have been lighter with their downvotes had the topic been another one—just a few people strong downvoting instead of simple downvoting can change the karma balance quite a bit