Folks, if you genuinely want to avoid ruining the universe, this kind of formal, analytic article is exactly the kind of article that we need more of. Everything else is just dicking around by comparison.
Instead, you vote them down into oblivion. Possibly because you feel entitled to vote against an analytical post if you can find any single element in it that you disagree with.
LessWrong has few analytical posts, and even fewer that try to develop new formalisms. Exactly what standard are you holding this post up to? Who here on less wrong, or anywhere, has done a better job of formalizing values? (That’s not a rhetorical question; post references.) What is your alternative?
Phil, I liked your post, but I empathize with the down-voters you’re worried about. Why?
The real content in the OP is that you’re measuring conflict in value systems, not some objective “worseness” that people know not to Platonize. This point was completely hidden to me until the 12th line where you said “This is an energy measure that we want to minimize”, which is too late and too roundabout for a thesis statement.
The original summary repeated the term “worse” from the title instead of earning my trust and curiosity by telling me what the content would really be about (conflict measurement). As a result, I was very tempted to stop reading.
So suppose instead you started the summary with “We’re going to measure conflict in value systems”, and clarified right away what you meant by “worse” in the shortened title. Then:
You’d earn my trust, and initiate a new curiosity: “How’s he going to measure conflict?”, and
Your model would be more immediately intuitive: starting to read it, I’d think “Oh, of cousre he’s plotting nodes and weighted edges… he wants to measure conflict,” furthering my trust that the article is actually going somewhere.
From experience, I expected your post to have eventually-decipherable interesting content, so I kept reading, and turns out it did. But perhaps not everyone felt justified to do so if they didn’t share that experience, and maybe they downvoted instead.
Generally speaking, if you want your ideas to reach lots of people and gain approval, you have to re-earn the reader’s trust and curiosity with every article you write.
I just realized I may have been a bit ambiguous at the end, so I ETAd “interesting” and “turns out it did” … i.e., I upvoted, and cheers for the analysis.
I voted your post down because I didn’t see why your formalism is important, and you didn’t give any reasons why it is. I also think that your statements about evolution are wrong, but that’s not why I voted you down.
I also downvoted the above comment because I don’t like it when people complain about being downvoted. You seem to think that the only relevant feature of your post is that it is formal, and that if it was downvoted, then people must not like formal analysis. In fact there are other formal posts that were well-received by the LW community, such as Wei Dai’s posts developing Updateless Decision Theory.
The formalism is important because the default assumption people use as to how CEV will be implemented is that it will be implemented by averaging value systems together.
I think that many people downvote anything containing a proof if they think that any step in the proof is wrong. But those downvotes aren’t just interpreted by others as meaning “this proof is incorrect”; they’re interpreted as meaning “this topic is unimportant” or “this approach is uninteresting”.
My formalism is important, if for no other reason than because it is the only one addressing the question of averaging values together. It is the only work ever done on this particular critical step of CEV.
But those downvotes aren’t just interpreted by others as meaning “this proof is incorrect”; they’re interpreted as meaning “this topic is unimportant” or “this approach is uninteresting”.
This goes the other way too. Often people will vote up posts for being interesting, and others can erroneously interpret the up votes as indicating the post is correct. I think it would be better if such a post were downvoted (not excessively) and some people left comments explaining that though the topic is interesting, the argument and conclusions are not correct. Someone who sees this and is capable of writing a better, correct article on the topic would be encouraged to do so.
Would it be worthwhile (given the added complexity) to vote on different aspects of posts, so it has seperately reported karma scores for correctness, being interesting, being a good approach, being useful, being entertaining, ect?
Would it be worthwhile (given the added complexity) to vote on different aspects of posts, so it has seperately reported karma scores for correctness, being interesting, being a good approach, being useful, being entertaining, ect?
I would support a more complex karma system like that, and I think you’ve got a reasonable set of categories.
I’m assuming it would be grafted onto the old system, so that old karma score would be retained, but the more specific scores would be the only ones which could be added.
“Interesting” and “entertaining” karma shouldn’t count for getting permission to do top level posts.
Folks, if you genuinely want to avoid ruining the universe, this kind of formal, analytic article is exactly the kind of article that we need more of. Everything else is just dicking around by comparison.
Instead, you vote them down into oblivion. Possibly because you feel entitled to vote against an analytical post if you can find any single element in it that you disagree with.
LessWrong has few analytical posts, and even fewer that try to develop new formalisms. Exactly what standard are you holding this post up to? Who here on less wrong, or anywhere, has done a better job of formalizing values? (That’s not a rhetorical question; post references.) What is your alternative?
Phil, I liked your post, but I empathize with the down-voters you’re worried about. Why?
The real content in the OP is that you’re measuring conflict in value systems, not some objective “worseness” that people know not to Platonize. This point was completely hidden to me until the 12th line where you said “This is an energy measure that we want to minimize”, which is too late and too roundabout for a thesis statement.
The original summary repeated the term “worse” from the title instead of earning my trust and curiosity by telling me what the content would really be about (conflict measurement). As a result, I was very tempted to stop reading.
So suppose instead you started the summary with “We’re going to measure conflict in value systems”, and clarified right away what you meant by “worse” in the shortened title. Then:
You’d earn my trust, and initiate a new curiosity: “How’s he going to measure conflict?”, and
Your model would be more immediately intuitive: starting to read it, I’d think “Oh, of cousre he’s plotting nodes and weighted edges… he wants to measure conflict,” furthering my trust that the article is actually going somewhere.
From experience, I expected your post to have eventually-decipherable interesting content, so I kept reading, and turns out it did. But perhaps not everyone felt justified to do so if they didn’t share that experience, and maybe they downvoted instead.
Generally speaking, if you want your ideas to reach lots of people and gain approval, you have to re-earn the reader’s trust and curiosity with every article you write.
Thanks—that’s a great critique.
I just realized I may have been a bit ambiguous at the end, so I ETAd “interesting” and “turns out it did” … i.e., I upvoted, and cheers for the analysis.
I voted your post down because I didn’t see why your formalism is important, and you didn’t give any reasons why it is. I also think that your statements about evolution are wrong, but that’s not why I voted you down.
I also downvoted the above comment because I don’t like it when people complain about being downvoted. You seem to think that the only relevant feature of your post is that it is formal, and that if it was downvoted, then people must not like formal analysis. In fact there are other formal posts that were well-received by the LW community, such as Wei Dai’s posts developing Updateless Decision Theory.
The formalism is important because the default assumption people use as to how CEV will be implemented is that it will be implemented by averaging value systems together.
I think that many people downvote anything containing a proof if they think that any step in the proof is wrong. But those downvotes aren’t just interpreted by others as meaning “this proof is incorrect”; they’re interpreted as meaning “this topic is unimportant” or “this approach is uninteresting”.
My formalism is important, if for no other reason than because it is the only one addressing the question of averaging values together. It is the only work ever done on this particular critical step of CEV.
No it isn’t. What about the entire field of voting theory?
I initially thought that it doesn’t address the question of the value of the output of the system, but on reflection it does. So, I stand corrected.
This goes the other way too. Often people will vote up posts for being interesting, and others can erroneously interpret the up votes as indicating the post is correct. I think it would be better if such a post were downvoted (not excessively) and some people left comments explaining that though the topic is interesting, the argument and conclusions are not correct. Someone who sees this and is capable of writing a better, correct article on the topic would be encouraged to do so.
Would it be worthwhile (given the added complexity) to vote on different aspects of posts, so it has seperately reported karma scores for correctness, being interesting, being a good approach, being useful, being entertaining, ect?
I would support a more complex karma system like that, and I think you’ve got a reasonable set of categories.
I’m assuming it would be grafted onto the old system, so that old karma score would be retained, but the more specific scores would be the only ones which could be added.
“Interesting” and “entertaining” karma shouldn’t count for getting permission to do top level posts.