[META] Why is this so heavily upvoted? Does that indicate actual value to LW, or just a majority of lurking septemberites captivated by cute pixel art?
It was just hacked out in a couple of hours to organize my thoughts for the meetup. It has little justification for anything, very little coherent overarching structure, and it’s not even really serious. It’s only 90% true, with many bugs. Very much a worse-is-better sort of post.
Now it’s promoted with 50-something upvotes. I notice that I would not predict this, and feel the need to update.
What should I (we) learn from this?
Am I underestimating the value of a given post-idea? (i.e. should we all err on the side of writing more?)
Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.
Are people just really interested in morality, or re-framing of problems, or well-linked integration posts?
Because you make few assertions of substance, there is a lot of empty space (where people, depending on their mood, may insert either unrealistically charitable or unrealistically uncharitable reconstructions of reasoning) and not a lot of specific content for anyone to disagree with. In contrast, if I make 10 very concrete and substantive suggestions in a post, and most people like 9 of them but hate the 10th, that could make them very reluctant to upvote the post as a whole, lest their vote be taken as a blanket endorsement for every claim.
Because the post is vague and humorous, people leave it feeling vaguely happy and not in a mood to pick it apart. Expressing this vague happiness as an upvote reifies it and makes it more intense. People like ‘liking’ things they like.
The post is actually useful, as a way of popularizing some deeper and more substantive meta-ethical and practical points. Some LessWrongers may be tired of endlessly arguing over which theory is most ideal, and instead hunger for better popularizations and summaries of the extant philosophical progress we’ve already made, so that we can start peddling those views to the masses. They may view your post as an important step in that Voltairean process, even if it doesn’t advance the distinct project of constructing the substance-for-future-popularization in the first place.
Meta-ethics is hard. There are very few easy answers, and there’s a lot of disagreement. Uncertainty and disagreement, and in general lack of closure, create a lot of unpleasant dissonance. Your article helps us pretend that we can ignore those problems, which alleviates the dissonance and makes us feel better. This would help explain why applause-lighting posts in areas like meta-ethics or the hard problem of consciousness see better results than applause-lighting posts in areas where substantive progress is easier.
The post invites people to oversimplify their utility calculations via the simple dichotomy ‘is it awesome, or isn’t it?‘. Whether or not your post is useful, informative, insightful ,etc., it is quite clearly ‘awesome,’ as the word is ordinarily used. So your post encourages people to simplify their evaluation procedure in a way that favors the post itself.
Given at least moderate quality, upvotes correlate much more tightly with accessibility / scope of audience than quality of writing. Remember, the article score isn’t an average of hundreds of scalar ratings—it’s the sum of thousands of ratings of [-1, 0, +1] -- and the default rating of anyone who doesn’t see, doesn’t care about, or doesn’t understand the thrust of a post is 0. If you get a high score, that says more about how many people bothered to process your post than about how many people thought it was the best post ever.
Yes, to counter this effect I tend to upvote the math-heavy decision theory posts and comment chains if I have even the slightest idea what’s going on, and the Vladimirs seem to think it’s not stupid.
As one of the upvoters, here is my thought process, as far as I recall it:
WTF?!! What does it even mean?
Wait, this kind of makes sense intuitively.
Hey, every example I can try actually works. I wonder why.
OK, so the OP suggests awesomeness as an overriding single intuitive terminal value. What does he mean by “intuitive”?
It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack “awesome” eventually fails on some example, while the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn’t.
He must be onto something.
Oh, and his approach is clearly awesome, so the post is self-consistent.
Gotta upvote!
Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!
It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack “awesome” eventually fails on some example, why the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn’t.
Totally. Hence the link to fake utility functions. I could have made this clearer; you’re not really supposed to unpack it, just use it as a rough pointer to your built-in moral intuitions. “oh that’s all there is to it”.
Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!
Don’t worry. I basically just went over this post, then went over “joy in the merely good”. We also discussed a bit, but the shield against useless philosophy provided by using “awesome” instead of “good” only lasted so long...
That said, it would have been nice to have you and your ideas there.
Karma votes on this site are fickle, superficial, and reward percieved humour and wit much more than they do hard work and local unconventionality; you’re allowed to be unconventional to the world-at-large, even encouraged to, if it’s conventional in LW; the reverse is not encouraged.
Your work was both novel and completely in line with what is popular here, and so it thrived. Try to present a novel perspective arguing against things that are unanymously liked yet culture-specific, such as sex or alcohol or sarcasm or Twitter or market economies as automatic optimizers, and you might not fare as well.
You can pick up on those trends by following the Twitter accounts of notable LWers, watch them pat each other on the back for expressing beliefs that signal their belonging to the tribe, and mimick them for easy karma, which you can stock reserves of for the times where you feel absolutely compelled to take a stand for an unpopular idea.
This problem is endemic of Karma systems and makes LW no worse than any other community. It’s just that one would expect them to hold themselves to a higher standard.
Yes, humour tends to be upvoted a lot, but it’s just not true that you can never get good karma by arguing against the LW majority position. For example, the most upvoted top-level post ever expresses scepticism about the Singularity Institute.
You indeed didn’t say “never”, but the implied meaning was closer to it than to the “not the most probable outcome” interpretation.
Also, saying that LW tends to upvote LW-conventional writings seems a little tautological, unless you have got a karma-independent way to assess LW-conventionality. Do you?
Also, saying that LW tends to upvote LW-conventional writings seems a little tautological, unless you have got a karma-independent way to assess LW-conventionality. Do you?
Count the number of comments that express the same notion. Or count the number of users that express said thought and contrast it with the number of users that contradict the thought.
It’s just that one would expect them to hold themselves to a higher standard.
I notice that you’re discussing what “they” do on LW. Not that I can honestly object; I’m often tempted to do so myself. It really helps when trying to draw the line between my own ideas, and all those crazy ideas everyone else here has.
But I think we are both actually fairly typical LWers, which means that it would be more correct to say something like “It’s just that one would expect us to hold ourselves to a higher standard”. This is a very different thought somehow, more than one would expect from a mere pronoun substitution.
It seems to me that the change is that with “us” the speaker is assumed to identify with the group under discussion. Specifically, it seems like they consider(ed) LW superior, and are disappointed that we have failed in this particular; whereas with “they” it seems to be accusing us of hypocrisy.
This problem is endemic of Karma systems and makes LW no worse than any other community. It’s just that one would expect them to hold themselves to a higher standard.
My impression of this post (which may not be evident from my comments) went something like this:
1) Hah. That’s a really funny opening. 2) Oh, this is really interesting and potentially useful, AND really funny, which is a really good combination for articles one the internet. 3) How would I apply this idea to my life? 4) think about it a bit, and read some comments, think some more 5) Wait a second, this idea actually isn’t nearly as useful as it seemed at first. 5a) To the extent that it’s true, it’s only the first thesis statement of a lengthy examination of the actual issue 5b) The rest of the sequence this would need to herald to be truly useful is not guaranteed to be nearly as fun 5c) Upon reflection, while “awesome” does capture elements of “good” that would be obscured by “good’s” baggage, “awesome” also fails to capture some of the intended value. 5d) This post is still useful, but not nearly as useful as my initial positive reaction indicates 5e) I am now dramatically more interested in the subject of how interesting this post seemed vs how interesting it actually was and what this says about the internet and people and ideas, then about the content of the article.
To the extent that it’s true, it’s only the first thesis statement of a lengthy examination of the actual issue
The rest of the sequence this would need to herald to be truly useful is not guaranteed to be nearly as fun
Yep. It’s intended as an introduction to the long and not-very-exciting metaethics sequence.
How would I apply this idea to my life?
Wait a second, this idea actually isn’t nearly as useful as it seemed at first.
Yeah, it tends to melt down under examination. (because “awesome” is a fake utility function, as per point 2). The point was not to give a bulletproof morality procedure, but to just reframe the issue in a way that bypasses the usual confusion and cached thoughts.
So I wouldn’t expect it to be useful to people who have their metaethical shit together (which you seem to, judging by the content of your rituals). It was explicitly aimed at people in my meetup who were confused and intimidated by the seeming mysteriousness of morality.
I am now dramatically more interested in the subject of how interesting this post seemed vs how interesting it actually was and what this says about the internet and people and ideas, then about the content of the article.
Yes the implications of this are very interesting.
Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.
I DUNT KNOW LETS TRY
It’s not necessarily that a highly upvoted post is deemed better on average, each individual still only casts one vote. The trichotomy of “downvote / no vote / upvote” doesn’t provide nuanced feedback, and while you’d think it all equals out with a large number of votes, that’s not so because of a) modifying visibility by means secondary to the content of the post, b) capturing readers’ interest early to get them to vote in the first place and c) various distributions of opinions about your post all projecting onto potentially the same voting score (e.g. strong likes + strong dislikes equalling the score of general indifference), all three of which can occur independently of the post’s real content.
The visibility was increased with the promotion of your post. While you did need initial upvotes to support that promotion, once achieved there’s no stopping the chain reaction: People want to check out that highly rated top post, they expect to see good content and often automatically steelman / gloss over your weaker points. Then there’s a kind of implied peer pressure similar to Ash’s conformity experiments; you see a highly upvoted post, then monkey see monkey do kicks in, at least skewing your heuristics.
Lastly people you keep invested until the end of your post are more likely to upvote than downvote, and your pixel art does a good job of capturing attention, the opening scene of a movie is crucial. The lower the entry barrier into a post, the more people will tag along. A lesson well internalized by television. Compare the vote counts of some AIXI related posts and yours.
You are also called nyan_sandwich, have a good reputation on this site (AFAICT), yet provide us with some guilty pleasures (of an easy-to-parse comfort-food-for-thought post, talk about nomen est omen, nom nom). In short, you covered all your populist bases. They are all belong to you.
The visibility was increased with the promotion of your post.
I don’t think it was promoted until it had >30, so maybe that helped a bit, but I have another visibility explanation:
I tend to stick around in my posts and obsessively reply to every comment and cherish every upvote, which means it gets a lot of visibility in the “recent comments” section. My posts tend to have lots of comments, and I think it’s largely me trying to get the last word on everything. (until I get swamped and give up)
It is kind of odd that unpromoted posts in main have strictly less visibility than posts in discussion...
each individual still only casts one vote. In short, you covered all your populist bases.
This is a good explanation. I get it now I think. Now the question is if we should be doing more of that?
Basically, name causes behavior, as far as I can tell. Your nickname is indeed very aptronymical (?) to providing a quick and easy lunch for the hungry mind in a humorous or good-feeling manner.
I thought the question was “Does this post have value?” or “Can you quantify the extent to which these here upvotes correlate with value?” and not “How did I get upvotes?”
Why is this so heavily upvoted? Does that indicate actual value to LW, or just a majority of lurking septemberites captivated by cute pixel art?
Pointing out how the genesis of the upvotes is based on mechanisms only weakly related to the content value seems pertinent to answering the two questions in the quote.
It’s definitely pertinent, but it seems a bit one-sided? As an upvoter, I was trying really hard confess my love for whale and quantify it alongside my appreciation for fun and clarity. So I’m concerned that the above reads more like “it was probably all nyans and noms” as opposed to “nyans and noms were a factor.”
The whale, the fun and the clarity (and the wardrobe, too) all belong on the same side of “structure, seriousness, watertightness” versus “fun and clarity” as per the dichotomy in my initial comment’s quote. It would be weird if content hadn’t been a factor, albeit one that’s been swallowed whole by a vile white whale.
I must confess I don’t understand half of what you guys are referring to.
You’re not missing much, it’s just some throwaway references that aren’t central to the point.
“The whale, the fun and the clarity” has the same structure as the movie “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and also starts with an animal.
swallowed whole by a vile white whale
Swallowed whole by the whale was supposed to say that the content factor was secondary to the “whale factor”. The “swallowed” also allures to the whole Jonah story (who lived in a whale’s stomach), the whole / [wh]ile / whale was just infantile switching out of vowels, since interestingly all have a Hamming distance of just 1 (you only need to swap one letter).
talk about nomen est omen, nom nom
Your name contains a food item, and you provide guilty comfort food for thought with your post, so “nomen est omen” applies, i.e. your name is a sign of your purpose. The “nom nom” I just appended because it keeps with the food theme, and also because interestingly the “nom nom” is a partial anagram of “nomen est omen”.
Yea … not exactly essential to my arguments. Which in a way does support my points! :)
My own guess, based on nothing much other than a hunch: Morality as Awesomeness sounds simple and easy to do. It also sounds fun and light, unlike many of the other Ethical posts on LW. People have responded positively to this change of pace.
It’s an interesting perspective and it presents previous thinking on the subject in a more accessible manner.
Hence, one upvote. I don’t know that it’s worth sixty-three upvotes (I don’t know that it’s not), but I didn’t upvote it sixty-three times. Also, I see from the comments that it’s encouraged some interesting conversations (and perhaps some reading of the meta-ethics sequence, which I think is actually fairly well written if a little dense).
In other words, congratulations on writing something engaging! It’s harder than it looks.
a community in which people have a good idea but err on the side of not writing it up will tend toward a community in which people err on the of side of not bothering to flesh out their ideas?
fun and clarity are good starting points for structure, seriousness and watertightness? Picking out the bugs feels like a useful exercise for me, having just read the bit of the sequence talking about the impact of language.
I thought it was fun and clear and I liked the cute whale, but also it made me think. ^_^
Am I underestimating the value of a given post-idea? (i.e. should we all err on the side of writing more?)
I would tentatively advocate this (especially since there is already a system in place for filtering content into ‘promoted’ material for those who want a slower stream). More writing ⇒ more good writing.
LW is broken. Aspiring rationalistis should welcom argument contrary to their biases, but actually downvote it. Aspiring rationalists should not welcome pandering, dumbed-down ideas that don’t really solve problems or challenge them, but do.
I am assuming that if someone judges something to be useful, they are likely to upvote based on that. This is an alternative hypothesis to the one presented in your comment, that “aspiring rationalists” upvoted this because it is a “pandering, dumbed-down idea” that “do[es]n’t really solve problems or challenge them”.
Not really differrent. If you pander to someone by presenting dumbed-down ideas as profound, they are liable to like them and judge them to be useful. People judge junk food to be worth eating, after all.
they are liable to like them and judge them to be useful. People judge junk food to be worth eating, after all.
Are you arguing that judgments of usefulness have, in this case, (and others?) been distorted by the halo effect? Or have I misunderstood this comment?
Not the halo effect specifically. People are likely to make bad judgements about usefulness because such judgements are not easy to make. It takes some training. Someone who has been fed a dumbed-down diet is not going to be in a position to make a reliable judgement of the usefulness of the dumbed-down diet they have been fed.
Alright, who’s downvoting all comments in this conversation? If you have some objection to this line of discussion, come out and say it; don’t karmassassinate people.
EDIT: Ok, I may have misused “karmassassinate” there. I’m not sure. it’s annoying and unhelpful, whatever you call it.
I reject the idea that there’s something wrong with silent downvotes. (And “karmassassination” typically refers to downvoting a large chunk of a particular user’s posts without reference to their content, not to silent downvoting, nor to downvoting an entire conversational branch based on the branch’s content.)
eg “Metathics isn’t complicated, it just awesomeness”. However “Metaethics is complicated, but you can get an initial toehold on it by considering awesomeness” is OK. That;s just introductory.
[META] Why is this so heavily upvoted? Does that indicate actual value to LW, or just a majority of lurking septemberites captivated by cute pixel art?
It was just hacked out in a couple of hours to organize my thoughts for the meetup. It has little justification for anything, very little coherent overarching structure, and it’s not even really serious. It’s only 90% true, with many bugs. Very much a worse-is-better sort of post.
Now it’s promoted with 50-something upvotes. I notice that I would not predict this, and feel the need to update.
What should I (we) learn from this?
Am I underestimating the value of a given post-idea? (i.e. should we all err on the side of writing more?)
Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.
Are people just really interested in morality, or re-framing of problems, or well-linked integration posts?
Because you make few assertions of substance, there is a lot of empty space (where people, depending on their mood, may insert either unrealistically charitable or unrealistically uncharitable reconstructions of reasoning) and not a lot of specific content for anyone to disagree with. In contrast, if I make 10 very concrete and substantive suggestions in a post, and most people like 9 of them but hate the 10th, that could make them very reluctant to upvote the post as a whole, lest their vote be taken as a blanket endorsement for every claim.
Because the post is vague and humorous, people leave it feeling vaguely happy and not in a mood to pick it apart. Expressing this vague happiness as an upvote reifies it and makes it more intense. People like ‘liking’ things they like.
The post is actually useful, as a way of popularizing some deeper and more substantive meta-ethical and practical points. Some LessWrongers may be tired of endlessly arguing over which theory is most ideal, and instead hunger for better popularizations and summaries of the extant philosophical progress we’ve already made, so that we can start peddling those views to the masses. They may view your post as an important step in that Voltairean process, even if it doesn’t advance the distinct project of constructing the substance-for-future-popularization in the first place.
Meta-ethics is hard. There are very few easy answers, and there’s a lot of disagreement. Uncertainty and disagreement, and in general lack of closure, create a lot of unpleasant dissonance. Your article helps us pretend that we can ignore those problems, which alleviates the dissonance and makes us feel better. This would help explain why applause-lighting posts in areas like meta-ethics or the hard problem of consciousness see better results than applause-lighting posts in areas where substantive progress is easier.
The post invites people to oversimplify their utility calculations via the simple dichotomy ‘is it awesome, or isn’t it?‘. Whether or not your post is useful, informative, insightful ,etc., it is quite clearly ‘awesome,’ as the word is ordinarily used. So your post encourages people to simplify their evaluation procedure in a way that favors the post itself.
Given at least moderate quality, upvotes correlate much more tightly with accessibility / scope of audience than quality of writing. Remember, the article score isn’t an average of hundreds of scalar ratings—it’s the sum of thousands of ratings of [-1, 0, +1] -- and the default rating of anyone who doesn’t see, doesn’t care about, or doesn’t understand the thrust of a post is 0. If you get a high score, that says more about how many people bothered to process your post than about how many people thought it was the best post ever.
Yes, to counter this effect I tend to upvote the math-heavy decision theory posts and comment chains if I have even the slightest idea what’s going on, and the Vladimirs seem to think it’s not stupid.
Ironically, this is my most-upvoted comment in several months.
As one of the upvoters, here is my thought process, as far as I recall it:
WTF?!! What does it even mean?
Wait, this kind of makes sense intuitively.
Hey, every example I can try actually works. I wonder why.
OK, so the OP suggests awesomeness as an overriding single intuitive terminal value. What does he mean by “intuitive”?
It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack “awesome” eventually fails on some example, while the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn’t.
He must be onto something.
Oh, and his approach is clearly awesome, so the post is self-consistent.
Gotta upvote!
Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!
Totally. Hence the link to fake utility functions. I could have made this clearer; you’re not really supposed to unpack it, just use it as a rough pointer to your built-in moral intuitions. “oh that’s all there is to it”.
Don’t worry. I basically just went over this post, then went over “joy in the merely good”. We also discussed a bit, but the shield against useless philosophy provided by using “awesome” instead of “good” only lasted so long...
That said, it would have been nice to have you and your ideas there.
I have typically been awful at predicting which parts of HPMOR people would most enjoy. I suggest relaxing and enjoying the hedons.
Karma votes on this site are fickle, superficial, and reward percieved humour and wit much more than they do hard work and local unconventionality; you’re allowed to be unconventional to the world-at-large, even encouraged to, if it’s conventional in LW; the reverse is not encouraged.
Your work was both novel and completely in line with what is popular here, and so it thrived. Try to present a novel perspective arguing against things that are unanymously liked yet culture-specific, such as sex or alcohol or sarcasm or Twitter or market economies as automatic optimizers, and you might not fare as well.
You can pick up on those trends by following the Twitter accounts of notable LWers, watch them pat each other on the back for expressing beliefs that signal their belonging to the tribe, and mimick them for easy karma, which you can stock reserves of for the times where you feel absolutely compelled to take a stand for an unpopular idea.
This problem is endemic of Karma systems and makes LW no worse than any other community. It’s just that one would expect them to hold themselves to a higher standard.
Awesome post, BTW. Nice brain-hacking.
Yes, humour tends to be upvoted a lot, but it’s just not true that you can never get good karma by arguing against the LW majority position. For example, the most upvoted top-level post ever expresses scepticism about the Singularity Institute.
I never said “never”; I implied that it’s not the most probable outcome.
You indeed didn’t say “never”, but the implied meaning was closer to it than to the “not the most probable outcome” interpretation.
Also, saying that LW tends to upvote LW-conventional writings seems a little tautological, unless you have got a karma-independent way to assess LW-conventionality. Do you?
Count the number of comments that express the same notion. Or count the number of users that express said thought and contrast it with the number of users that contradict the thought.
Thank you, werd.
This is my failure as a communicator and I apologize for it.
I notice that you’re discussing what “they” do on LW. Not that I can honestly object; I’m often tempted to do so myself. It really helps when trying to draw the line between my own ideas, and all those crazy ideas everyone else here has.
But I think we are both actually fairly typical LWers, which means that it would be more correct to say something like “It’s just that one would expect us to hold ourselves to a higher standard”. This is a very different thought somehow, more than one would expect from a mere pronoun substitution.
“Them” as in “the rest of the community, excepting the exceptions”. I hold myself to those standards just fine, and there may well be others who do.
Relatedly, I often find replacing “one would expect” with “I expect” has similar effects.
Especially when it turns out the latter isn’t true.
It seems to me that the change is that with “us” the speaker is assumed to identify with the group under discussion. Specifically, it seems like they consider(ed) LW superior, and are disappointed that we have failed in this particular; whereas with “they” it seems to be accusing us of hypocrisy.
hear, hear!
My impression of this post (which may not be evident from my comments) went something like this:
1) Hah. That’s a really funny opening.
2) Oh, this is really interesting and potentially useful, AND really funny, which is a really good combination for articles one the internet.
3) How would I apply this idea to my life?
4) think about it a bit, and read some comments, think some more
5) Wait a second, this idea actually isn’t nearly as useful as it seemed at first.
5a) To the extent that it’s true, it’s only the first thesis statement of a lengthy examination of the actual issue
5b) The rest of the sequence this would need to herald to be truly useful is not guaranteed to be nearly as fun
5c) Upon reflection, while “awesome” does capture elements of “good” that would be obscured by “good’s” baggage, “awesome” also fails to capture some of the intended value.
5d) This post is still useful, but not nearly as useful as my initial positive reaction indicates
5e) I am now dramatically more interested in the subject of how interesting this post seemed vs how interesting it actually was and what this says about the internet and people and ideas, then about the content of the article.
Yep. It’s intended as an introduction to the long and not-very-exciting metaethics sequence.
Yeah, it tends to melt down under examination. (because “awesome” is a fake utility function, as per point 2). The point was not to give a bulletproof morality procedure, but to just reframe the issue in a way that bypasses the usual confusion and cached thoughts.
So I wouldn’t expect it to be useful to people who have their metaethical shit together (which you seem to, judging by the content of your rituals). It was explicitly aimed at people in my meetup who were confused and intimidated by the seeming mysteriousness of morality.
Yes the implications of this are very interesting.
I DUNT KNOW LETS TRY
It’s not necessarily that a highly upvoted post is deemed better on average, each individual still only casts one vote. The trichotomy of “downvote / no vote / upvote” doesn’t provide nuanced feedback, and while you’d think it all equals out with a large number of votes, that’s not so because of a) modifying visibility by means secondary to the content of the post, b) capturing readers’ interest early to get them to vote in the first place and c) various distributions of opinions about your post all projecting onto potentially the same voting score (e.g. strong likes + strong dislikes equalling the score of general indifference), all three of which can occur independently of the post’s real content.
The visibility was increased with the promotion of your post. While you did need initial upvotes to support that promotion, once achieved there’s no stopping the chain reaction: People want to check out that highly rated top post, they expect to see good content and often automatically steelman / gloss over your weaker points. Then there’s a kind of implied peer pressure similar to Ash’s conformity experiments; you see a highly upvoted post, then monkey see monkey do kicks in, at least skewing your heuristics.
Lastly people you keep invested until the end of your post are more likely to upvote than downvote, and your pixel art does a good job of capturing attention, the opening scene of a movie is crucial. The lower the entry barrier into a post, the more people will tag along. A lesson well internalized by television. Compare the vote counts of some AIXI related posts and yours.
You are also called nyan_sandwich, have a good reputation on this site (AFAICT), yet provide us with some guilty pleasures (of an easy-to-parse comfort-food-for-thought post, talk about nomen est omen, nom nom). In short, you covered all your populist bases. They are all belong to you.
I don’t think it was promoted until it had >30, so maybe that helped a bit, but I have another visibility explanation:
I tend to stick around in my posts and obsessively reply to every comment and cherish every upvote, which means it gets a lot of visibility in the “recent comments” section. My posts tend to have lots of comments, and I think it’s largely me trying to get the last word on everything. (until I get swamped and give up)
It is kind of odd that unpromoted posts in main have strictly less visibility than posts in discussion...
This is a good explanation. I get it now I think. Now the question is if we should be doing more of that?
EDIT: also, what does this mean:
Basically, name causes behavior, as far as I can tell. Your nickname is indeed very aptronymical (?) to providing a quick and easy lunch for the hungry mind in a humorous or good-feeling manner.
I thought the question was “Does this post have value?” or “Can you quantify the extent to which these here upvotes correlate with value?” and not “How did I get upvotes?”
Pointing out how the genesis of the upvotes is based on mechanisms only weakly related to the content value seems pertinent to answering the two questions in the quote.
It’s definitely pertinent, but it seems a bit one-sided? As an upvoter, I was trying really hard confess my love for whale and quantify it alongside my appreciation for fun and clarity. So I’m concerned that the above reads more like “it was probably all nyans and noms” as opposed to “nyans and noms were a factor.”
The whale, the fun and the clarity (and the wardrobe, too) all belong on the same side of “structure, seriousness, watertightness” versus “fun and clarity” as per the dichotomy in my initial comment’s quote. It would be weird if content hadn’t been a factor, albeit one that’s been swallowed whole by a vile white whale.
I must confess I don’t understand half of what you guys are referring to.
You’re not missing much, it’s just some throwaway references that aren’t central to the point.
“The whale, the fun and the clarity” has the same structure as the movie “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and also starts with an animal.
Swallowed whole by the whale was supposed to say that the content factor was secondary to the “whale factor”. The “swallowed” also allures to the whole Jonah story (who lived in a whale’s stomach), the whole / [wh]ile / whale was just infantile switching out of vowels, since interestingly all have a Hamming distance of just 1 (you only need to swap one letter).
Your name contains a food item, and you provide guilty comfort food for thought with your post, so “nomen est omen” applies, i.e. your name is a sign of your purpose. The “nom nom” I just appended because it keeps with the food theme, and also because interestingly the “nom nom” is a partial anagram of “nomen est omen”.
Yea … not exactly essential to my arguments. Which in a way does support my points! :)
So it had nothing to do with Moby Dick?
No, of course not!
My own guess, based on nothing much other than a hunch: Morality as Awesomeness sounds simple and easy to do. It also sounds fun and light, unlike many of the other Ethical posts on LW. People have responded positively to this change of pace.
For me, high (insight + fun) per (time + effort).
It’s an interesting perspective and it presents previous thinking on the subject in a more accessible manner.
Hence, one upvote. I don’t know that it’s worth sixty-three upvotes (I don’t know that it’s not), but I didn’t upvote it sixty-three times. Also, I see from the comments that it’s encouraged some interesting conversations (and perhaps some reading of the meta-ethics sequence, which I think is actually fairly well written if a little dense).
In other words, congratulations on writing something engaging! It’s harder than it looks.
I upvoted it because I loved what you did. (I did feel it was, er… awesome, but before reading that comment I couldn’t have put it down in words.)
I think
a community in which people have a good idea but err on the side of not writing it up will tend toward a community in which people err on the of side of not bothering to flesh out their ideas?
fun and clarity are good starting points for structure, seriousness and watertightness? Picking out the bugs feels like a useful exercise for me, having just read the bit of the sequence talking about the impact of language.
I thought it was fun and clear and I liked the cute whale, but also it made me think. ^_^
I would tentatively advocate this (especially since there is already a system in place for filtering content into ‘promoted’ material for those who want a slower stream). More writing ⇒ more good writing.
LW is broken. Aspiring rationalistis should welcom argument contrary to their biases, but actually downvote it. Aspiring rationalists should not welcome pandering, dumbed-down ideas that don’t really solve problems or challenge them, but do.
Have you considered the possibiltiy that some people actually found this useful?
You see to be assuming that if someone judges something to be useful, that is the last word on the subject.
I am assuming that if someone judges something to be useful, they are likely to upvote based on that. This is an alternative hypothesis to the one presented in your comment, that “aspiring rationalists” upvoted this because it is a “pandering, dumbed-down idea” that “do[es]n’t really solve problems or challenge them”.
Not really differrent. If you pander to someone by presenting dumbed-down ideas as profound, they are liable to like them and judge them to be useful. People judge junk food to be worth eating, after all.
Are you arguing that judgments of usefulness have, in this case, (and others?) been distorted by the halo effect? Or have I misunderstood this comment?
Not the halo effect specifically. People are likely to make bad judgements about usefulness because such judgements are not easy to make. It takes some training. Someone who has been fed a dumbed-down diet is not going to be in a position to make a reliable judgement of the usefulness of the dumbed-down diet they have been fed.
Could you taboo “dumbed-down”? Because it appears I have no idea what you’re talking about (or you could be talking gibberish, I suppose.)
Alright, who’s downvoting all comments in this conversation? If you have some objection to this line of discussion, come out and say it; don’t karmassassinate people.
EDIT: Ok, I may have misused “karmassassinate” there. I’m not sure. it’s annoying and unhelpful, whatever you call it.
I reject the idea that there’s something wrong with silent downvotes. (And “karmassassination” typically refers to downvoting a large chunk of a particular user’s posts without reference to their content, not to silent downvoting, nor to downvoting an entire conversational branch based on the branch’s content.)
eg “Metathics isn’t complicated, it just awesomeness”. However “Metaethics is complicated, but you can get an initial toehold on it by considering awesomeness” is OK. That;s just introductory.
I’m aware that you think this is an example. Could you tell me what you mean?
Presenting something that is simplistic (too simple, lossy) as if it were adequate, or even superior to standard versions.
I see. And you claim that overexposure to such material has rendered the average LW member unable to detect oversimplification?
Thats my explanation for the upvoting that puzzled the articles’ author.
Thank you for clarifying.