Voting Phase for 2019 Review

Click here to begin voting. Click here for a general overview of the 2019 review.

We are now in the final stretches of the LessWrong 2019 Review. We’ve spent 2 weeks nominating posts, and a month reviewing them. And today, we begin the final vote!

A recap on the major goals of the Review:

First, it is an experiment in improving the LessWrong community’s longterm feedback and reward cycle.
Second, it is an attempt to build common knowledge about the best ideas we’ve discovered on LessWrong.
Third, after the vote, the LessWrong Team will compile the top posts into a physical book. (We may make some judgment* calls about what to include, but will use the vote as a strong guideline)

Voting starts today (January 12th) and continues through Jan 26th.

Who can vote?

All users registered before 2019 can vote, but the LW curation team will primarily be paying attention to the votes of users with 1000+ karma.

(There will essentially be a “top users’ vote”, and a “people’s vote.” The results of both will be made public, but the longterm-users’ vote will be the main thing influencing the Best of 2019 Book)

Anyone can still write reviews

For all users and lurkers, regardless of karma, the next 2 weeks are your last opportunity to write reviews for any nominated posts in 2019, which can influence how people vote. As you can see below, all reviews are highlighted when a user is voting on a post. (To review a post, go to the post and click “Write A Review” at the top of the post.)

Posts need at least 1 review to appear in the vote. You can still review previously un-reviewed posts to put them on the ballot. (But, people who vote early might not see them)

How do I vote?

To vote, head over to lesswrong.com/reviewVoting.

The vote has a simple first section, and a detailed-yet-optional second section based on quadratic voting.

Sorting Posts Into Buckets

The first part of voting is sorting the nominated posts into buckets.

The five buckets are: No, Neutral, Good, Important, Crucial. Sort the posts however you think is best.

The key part is the relative weighting of different posts. For example, it won’t make a difference to your final vote if you put every post in ‘crucial’ or every post in ‘good’.

Fine-Tuning Your Votes

Once you’re happy with your buckets, you can click ‘Convert to Quadratic’. At this point the system converts your buckets roughly into their quadratic equivalents.

The system will only assign integer numbers of votes, which means that it will likely only allocate around 80-90% of the total votes available to you. If you vote on a smaller number of posts (<10), the automatic system may not use your entire quadratic voting budget.

If you’re happy with how things look, you can just leave at this point, and your votes will be saved (you can come back any time before the vote closes to update them). But if you want to allocate 100% of your available votes, you’ll likely need to do fine-tuning.

There are two key parts of quadratic voting you need to know:

First, you have a limited budget of votes.

Second, votes on a post have increasing marginal cost.

This means that your first vote costs 1 point, your second vote on that post costs 2 points, your third costs 3 points. Your nth vote costs n points.

You have 500 points to spend. You can see how many points you’ve spent at the top of the posts.

The system will automatically weight the buckets differently. For example, I just did this, and I got the following weightings:

Good: 2 votes.
Important: 4 votes.
Crucial: 9 votes.
Neutral: 0 votes.
No: −4 votes.

(Note that negative votes cost the same as positive votes. The first negative vote costs 1 point, the second negative vote costs 2 points, etc.)

You’ll see your score at the top of the page. (When I arrived on the fine-tuning page, the system had spent about 416 points, which meant I had a significant number of votes left to buy.)

Once you’re happy with the balance, just close the page; your votes will be saved.

You can return to this page anytime until voting is over, to reconfigure your weights.

Quick Note Buttons

This year, in addition to full reviews, we’re providing these “quick note” buttons.

For each post, click any of these buttons if it describes your opinion of the post. These will be aggregated to get a sense of people’s qualitative opinion on the post.

Happy Voting

That’s it! Go forth and vote, and let us know if you have any questions, bug-fixes, or suggestions for next year!

* The LW Team reserves the right to make judgment calls about what actually goes in the book. Last year, we left off a couple posts that were too long, and included brief notes about a few lower-ranked posts that we felt were important. But, overall we’ll be taking the vote as a strong indicator of what the LessWrong community thought was important.