I’ve been a longtime lurker, and tried to write up a post a while ago, only to see that I didn’t have enough karma. I figure this is is the post for a newbie to present something new. I already published this particular post on my personal blog, but if the community here enjoys it enough to give it karma, I’d gladly turn it into a top-level post here, if that’s in order.
When I’m debating some controversial topic with someone older than I am, even if I can thoroughly demolish their argument, I am sometimes met with a troubling claim, that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I’ll come around on the topic. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that my opinion is based primarily on nothing more than my perception from personal experience.
When my cornered opponent makes this claim, it’s a last resort. It’s unwarranted condescension, because it reveals how wrong their entire approach is. Just by making the claim, they demonstrate that they believe all opinions are based primarily on an accumulation of personal experiences, even their own opinions. Their assumption reveals that they are not Bayesian, and that they intuit that no one is. For not being Bayesian, they have no authority that warrants such condescension.
I intentionally avoid presenting personal anecdotes cobbled together as evidence, because I know that projecting my own experience onto a situation to explain it is no evidence at all. I know that I suffer from all sorts of cognitive biases that obstruct my understanding of the truth. As such, my inclination is to rely on academic consensus. If I explain this explicitly to my opponent, they might dismiss academics as unreliable and irrelevant, hopelessly stuck in the ivory tower of academia.
Dismiss academics at your own peril. Sometimes there are very good reasons for dismissing academic consensus. I concede that most academics aren’t Bayesian because academia is an elaborate credentialing and status-signaling mechanism. Furthermore, academics have often been wrong. The Sokal affair illustrates that entire fields can exist completely without merit. That academic consensus can easily be wrong should be intuitively obvious to an atheist; religious community leaders have always been considered academic experts, the most learned and smartest members of society. Still, it would be a fallacious inversion of an argument from authority to dismiss academic consensus simply because it is academic consensus.
For all of academia’s flaws, the process of peer-reviewed scientific inquiry, informed by logic, statistics, and regression analysis, offers a better chance at discovering truth than any other institution in history. It is noble and desirable to criticize academic theories, but only as part of intellectually honest, impartial scientific inquiry. Dismissing academic consensus out of hand is primitive, and indicates intellectual dishonesty.
What you seem to be saying, that I agree with, is that it’s irritating as well as irrelevant when people try to pull authority on you, using “age” or “quantity of experience” as a proxy for authority. Yes, argument does screen off authority. But that’s no reason to knock “life experience”.
If opinions are not based on “personal experience”, what can they possibly be based on? Reading a book is a personal experience. Arguing an issue with someone (and changing your mind) is a personal experience. Learning anything is a personal experience, which (unless you’re too good at compartmentalizing) colors your other beliefs.
Perhaps the issue is with your thinking that “demolishing someone’s argument” is a worthwhile instrumental goal in pursuit of truth. A more fruitful goal is to repair your interlocutor’s argument, to acknowledge how their personal experience has led them to having whatever beliefs they have, and expose symmetrically what elements in your own experience lead you to different views.
Anecdotes are evidence, even though they can be weak evidence. They can be strong evidence too. For instance, having read this comment after I read the commenter’s original report of his experience as an isolated individual, I’d be more inclined to lend credence to the “stealth blimp” theory. I would have dismissed that theory on the basis of reading the Wikipedia page alone or hearing the anecdote along, but I have a low prior probability for someone on LessWrong arranging to seem as if he looked up news reports after first making a honest disclosure to other people interested in truth-seeking.
It seems inconsistent on your part to start off with a rant about “anecdotes”, and then make a strong, absolute claimed based solely on “the Sokal affair”—which at the scale of scientific institutions is anecdotal.
I think you’re trying to make two distinct points and getting them mixed up, and as a result not getting either point across. One of these points I believe needs to be moderated—the one where you say “personal experiences aren’t evidence”—because they are evidence; the other is where you say “people who speak with too much confidence are more likely to be wrong, including a) people older than you, b) some academics, but not necessarily the academic consensus”.
That is perhaps a third point—just why you think that “the process of peer-reviewed scientific inquiry, informed by logic, statistics, and regression analysis, offers a better chance at discovering truth than any other institution in history”. That’s a strong claim subject to the conjunction fallacy: are each of peer review, logic, statistics and regression analysis necessary elements of what makes scientific inquiry our best chance at discovering truth? Are they sufficient elements to be that best chance?
Thanks for the comment. The particular version you are commenting on was an earlier, worse version than what I posted and then pulled this morning. The version I posted this morning was much better than this. I actually changed the claim about the Sokal affair completely.
Due to what I fear was an information cascade of negative karma, I pulled the post so that I might make revisions.
The criticism concerning both this earlier version and the newer one from this morning still holds though. I too realized after the immediate negative feedback that I actually was combining, poorly, two different points and losing both of them in the process. I think I need to revise this into two different posts, or cut out the point about academia entirely. I will concede that anecdotes are evidence as well in the future version.
Unfortunately I was at exactly 50 karma, and now I’m back down to 20, so it will be a while before I can try again. I’ll be working on it.
Here’s the latest version, what I will attempt to post on the top level when I again have enough karma.
“Life Experience” as a Conversation-Halter
Sometimes in an argument, an older opponent might claim that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I’ll come around on the topic. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that age or quantity of experience is a proxy for legitimate authority. In and of itself, such “life experience” is necessary for an informed rational worldview, but it is not sufficient.
The claim that more “life experience” will completely reverse an opinion indicates that to the person making such a claim, belief that opinion is based primarily on an accumulation of anecdotes, perhaps derived from extensive availability bias. It actually is a pretty decent assumption that other people aren’t Bayesian, because for the most part, they aren’t. Many can confirm this, including Haidt, Kahneman, Tversky.
When an opponent appeals to more “life experience,” it’s a last resort, and it’s a conversation halter. This tactic is used when an opponent is cornered. The claim is nearly an outright acknowledgment of a move to exit the realm of rational debate. Why stick to rational discourse when you can shift to trading anecdotes? It levels the playing field, because anecdotes, while Bayesian evidence, are easily abused, especially for complex moral, social, and political claims. As rhetoric, this is frustratingly effective, but it’s logically rude.
Although it might be rude and rhetorically weak, it would be authoritatively appropriate for a Bayesian to be condescending to a non-Bayesian in an argument. Conversely, it can be downright maddening for a non-Bayesian to be condescending to a Bayesian, because the non-Bayesian lacks the epistemological authority to warrant such condescension. E.T. Jaynes wrote in Probability Theory about the arrogance of the uninformed, “The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world’s problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this.”
Yes, argument does screen off authority. But that’s no reason to knock “life experience”. … Learning anything is a personal experience, which colors your other beliefs. … A more fruitful goal is to repair your interlocutor’s argument, to acknowledge how their personal experience has led them to having whatever beliefs they have, and expose symmetrically what elements in your own experience lead you to different views.
I agree with your point and your recommendation. Life experiences can provide evidence, and they can also be an excuse to avoid providing arguments. You need to distinguish which one it is when someone brings it up. Usually, if it is valid evidence, the other person should be able to articulate which insight a life experience would provide to you, if you were to have it, even if they can’t pass the experience directly to your mind.
I remember arguing with a family member about a matter of policy (for obvious reasons I won’t say what), and when she couldn’t seem to defend her position, she said, “Well, when you have kids, you’ll see my side.” Yet, from context, it seems she could have, more helpfully, said, “Well, when you have kids, you’ll be much more risk-averse, and therefore see why I prefer to keep the system as is” and then we could have gone on to reasons about why one or the other system is risky.
In another case (this time an email exchange on the issue of pricing carbon emissions), someone said I would “get” his point if I would just read the famous Coase paper on externalities. While I hadn’t read it, I was familiar with the arguments in it, and ~99% sure my position accounted for its points, so I kept pressing him to tell me which insight I didn’t fully appreciate. Thankfully, such probing led him to erroneously state what he thought was my opinion, and when I mentioned this, he decided it wouldn’t change my opinion.
The Sokal affair illustrates that entire fields can exist completely without merit.
It illustrated nothing of the sort. The Sokal affair illustrated that a non-peer-reviewed, non-science journal will publish bad science writing that was believed to be submitted in good faith.
Social Text was not peer-reviewed because they were hoping to… do… something. What Sokal did was similar to stealing everything from a ‘good faith’ vegetable stand and then criticizing its owner for not having enough security.
Noted. In another draft I’ll change this to make the point how easy it is for high-status academics to deal in gibberish. Maybe they didn’t have so much status external to their group of peers, but within it, did they?
What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove
“From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn’t prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science—much less sociology of science—is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of one rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a conveniently credentialed ally'' (as Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted[12]), flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions, and attacked theirenemies″.[13]”
For not being Bayesian, they have no authority that warrants such condescension.
It’s unclear what you mean by both “Bayesian” and by “authority” in this sentence. If a person is “Bayesian”, does it give “authority” for condescension?
There clearly is some truth to the claim that being around longer sometimes allows to arrive at more accurate beliefs, including more accurate intuitive assessment of the situation, if you are not down a crazy road in the particular domain. It’s not a very strong evidence, and it can’t defeat many forms of more direct evidence pointing in the contrary direction, but sometimes it’s an OK heuristic, especially if you are not aware of other evidence (“ask the elder”).
Maybe “authority” is the wrong word. What I mean is that the opponent making this claim is dismissing my stance as wrong, because of my supposed less experience. It means that they believe that truth follows from collecting anecdotes. They ascertain that because they have more anecdotes, they are correct, and I am incorrect. For not being rational, we can’t trust their standard of truth to dismiss my position as wrong, since their whole methodology is hopelessly flawed.
For not being rational, we can’t trust their standard of truth to dismiss my position as wrong, since their whole methodology is hopelessly flawed.
Your core claim seems to be that you should dismiss statements (as opposed to arguments) by “irrational” people. This is a more general idea, basically unrelated to amount of their personal experience or other features of typical conversations which you discuss in your comment.
If someone’s argument, and therefore position, is irrational, how can we trust them to give honest and accurate criticism of other arguments?
At which point you are completely forsaking your original argument (rightfully or wrongly, which is a separate concern), which is the idea of my critical comment above. It’s unclear what you are arguing about, if your conclusion is equivalent to a much simpler premise that you have to assume independently of the argument. This sounds like rationalization (again, no matter whether the conclusion-advice-heuristic is correct or not).
I take “life experience” to mean a haphazard collection of anecdotes.
Claims from haphazardly collected anecdotes do not constitute legitimate evidence, though I concede those claims do often have positive correlations with true facts.
As such, relying on “life experience” is not rational. The point about condescension is tangential. The whole rhetorical technique is frustrating, because there is no way to move on from it. If “life experience” were legitimate evidence for the claim, the argument would not be able to continue until I have gained more “life experience,” and who decides how much would be sufficient? Would it be until I come around? Once we throw the standard of evidence out, we’re outside the bounds of rational discourse.
I take “life experience” to mean a haphazard collection of anecdotes.
I don’t think that’s something that most people who think “life experience” is valuable would agree to.
Claims from haphazardly collected anecdotes do not constitute legitimate evidence, though I concede those claims do often have positive correlations with true facts.
It might be profitable for you to revise your criteria for what constitutes legitimate evidence. Throwing away information that has a positive correlation with the thing you’re wondering about seems a bit hasty.
I am calling attention to reverting to “life experience” as recourse in an argument. If someone strays to that, it’s clear that we’re no longer considering evidence for whatever the argument is about. Referring back to “life experience” is far too nebulous to take as any evidence anything.
As for what constitutes legitimate evidence, even if anecdotes can correlate, anecdotes are not evidence!
Thanks for the votes. So, I’m not exactly sure how the karma system works. On the main page I see articles from people with less than 50 points, and I see prominent users that have nonsensically low counts. Do I still need 50 points to post a main article?
Users’ karma is only displayed on their user page (and the top contributors list). The number in the header of an article or comment is the score for that post only. Does this help?
Hello all,
I’ve been a longtime lurker, and tried to write up a post a while ago, only to see that I didn’t have enough karma. I figure this is is the post for a newbie to present something new. I already published this particular post on my personal blog, but if the community here enjoys it enough to give it karma, I’d gladly turn it into a top-level post here, if that’s in order.
Life Experience Should Not Modify Your Opinion http://paltrypress.blogspot.com/2009/11/life-experience-should-not-modify-your.html
When I’m debating some controversial topic with someone older than I am, even if I can thoroughly demolish their argument, I am sometimes met with a troubling claim, that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I’ll come around on the topic. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that my opinion is based primarily on nothing more than my perception from personal experience.
When my cornered opponent makes this claim, it’s a last resort. It’s unwarranted condescension, because it reveals how wrong their entire approach is. Just by making the claim, they demonstrate that they believe all opinions are based primarily on an accumulation of personal experiences, even their own opinions. Their assumption reveals that they are not Bayesian, and that they intuit that no one is. For not being Bayesian, they have no authority that warrants such condescension.
I intentionally avoid presenting personal anecdotes cobbled together as evidence, because I know that projecting my own experience onto a situation to explain it is no evidence at all. I know that I suffer from all sorts of cognitive biases that obstruct my understanding of the truth. As such, my inclination is to rely on academic consensus. If I explain this explicitly to my opponent, they might dismiss academics as unreliable and irrelevant, hopelessly stuck in the ivory tower of academia.
Dismiss academics at your own peril. Sometimes there are very good reasons for dismissing academic consensus. I concede that most academics aren’t Bayesian because academia is an elaborate credentialing and status-signaling mechanism. Furthermore, academics have often been wrong. The Sokal affair illustrates that entire fields can exist completely without merit. That academic consensus can easily be wrong should be intuitively obvious to an atheist; religious community leaders have always been considered academic experts, the most learned and smartest members of society. Still, it would be a fallacious inversion of an argument from authority to dismiss academic consensus simply because it is academic consensus.
For all of academia’s flaws, the process of peer-reviewed scientific inquiry, informed by logic, statistics, and regression analysis, offers a better chance at discovering truth than any other institution in history. It is noble and desirable to criticize academic theories, but only as part of intellectually honest, impartial scientific inquiry. Dismissing academic consensus out of hand is primitive, and indicates intellectual dishonesty.
What you seem to be saying, that I agree with, is that it’s irritating as well as irrelevant when people try to pull authority on you, using “age” or “quantity of experience” as a proxy for authority. Yes, argument does screen off authority. But that’s no reason to knock “life experience”.
If opinions are not based on “personal experience”, what can they possibly be based on? Reading a book is a personal experience. Arguing an issue with someone (and changing your mind) is a personal experience. Learning anything is a personal experience, which (unless you’re too good at compartmentalizing) colors your other beliefs.
Perhaps the issue is with your thinking that “demolishing someone’s argument” is a worthwhile instrumental goal in pursuit of truth. A more fruitful goal is to repair your interlocutor’s argument, to acknowledge how their personal experience has led them to having whatever beliefs they have, and expose symmetrically what elements in your own experience lead you to different views.
Anecdotes are evidence, even though they can be weak evidence. They can be strong evidence too. For instance, having read this comment after I read the commenter’s original report of his experience as an isolated individual, I’d be more inclined to lend credence to the “stealth blimp” theory. I would have dismissed that theory on the basis of reading the Wikipedia page alone or hearing the anecdote along, but I have a low prior probability for someone on LessWrong arranging to seem as if he looked up news reports after first making a honest disclosure to other people interested in truth-seeking.
It seems inconsistent on your part to start off with a rant about “anecdotes”, and then make a strong, absolute claimed based solely on “the Sokal affair”—which at the scale of scientific institutions is anecdotal.
I think you’re trying to make two distinct points and getting them mixed up, and as a result not getting either point across. One of these points I believe needs to be moderated—the one where you say “personal experiences aren’t evidence”—because they are evidence; the other is where you say “people who speak with too much confidence are more likely to be wrong, including a) people older than you, b) some academics, but not necessarily the academic consensus”.
That is perhaps a third point—just why you think that “the process of peer-reviewed scientific inquiry, informed by logic, statistics, and regression analysis, offers a better chance at discovering truth than any other institution in history”. That’s a strong claim subject to the conjunction fallacy: are each of peer review, logic, statistics and regression analysis necessary elements of what makes scientific inquiry our best chance at discovering truth? Are they sufficient elements to be that best chance?
Hi Morendil,
Thanks for the comment. The particular version you are commenting on was an earlier, worse version than what I posted and then pulled this morning. The version I posted this morning was much better than this. I actually changed the claim about the Sokal affair completely.
Due to what I fear was an information cascade of negative karma, I pulled the post so that I might make revisions.
The criticism concerning both this earlier version and the newer one from this morning still holds though. I too realized after the immediate negative feedback that I actually was combining, poorly, two different points and losing both of them in the process. I think I need to revise this into two different posts, or cut out the point about academia entirely. I will concede that anecdotes are evidence as well in the future version.
Unfortunately I was at exactly 50 karma, and now I’m back down to 20, so it will be a while before I can try again. I’ll be working on it.
Here’s the latest version, what I will attempt to post on the top level when I again have enough karma.
“Life Experience” as a Conversation-Halter
Sometimes in an argument, an older opponent might claim that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I’ll come around on the topic. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that age or quantity of experience is a proxy for legitimate authority. In and of itself, such “life experience” is necessary for an informed rational worldview, but it is not sufficient.
The claim that more “life experience” will completely reverse an opinion indicates that to the person making such a claim, belief that opinion is based primarily on an accumulation of anecdotes, perhaps derived from extensive availability bias. It actually is a pretty decent assumption that other people aren’t Bayesian, because for the most part, they aren’t. Many can confirm this, including Haidt, Kahneman, Tversky.
When an opponent appeals to more “life experience,” it’s a last resort, and it’s a conversation halter. This tactic is used when an opponent is cornered. The claim is nearly an outright acknowledgment of a move to exit the realm of rational debate. Why stick to rational discourse when you can shift to trading anecdotes? It levels the playing field, because anecdotes, while Bayesian evidence, are easily abused, especially for complex moral, social, and political claims. As rhetoric, this is frustratingly effective, but it’s logically rude.
Although it might be rude and rhetorically weak, it would be authoritatively appropriate for a Bayesian to be condescending to a non-Bayesian in an argument. Conversely, it can be downright maddening for a non-Bayesian to be condescending to a Bayesian, because the non-Bayesian lacks the epistemological authority to warrant such condescension. E.T. Jaynes wrote in Probability Theory about the arrogance of the uninformed, “The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world’s problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this.”
Sorry; I didn’t realize that I can still post. I went ahead and posted it.
I agree with your point and your recommendation. Life experiences can provide evidence, and they can also be an excuse to avoid providing arguments. You need to distinguish which one it is when someone brings it up. Usually, if it is valid evidence, the other person should be able to articulate which insight a life experience would provide to you, if you were to have it, even if they can’t pass the experience directly to your mind.
I remember arguing with a family member about a matter of policy (for obvious reasons I won’t say what), and when she couldn’t seem to defend her position, she said, “Well, when you have kids, you’ll see my side.” Yet, from context, it seems she could have, more helpfully, said, “Well, when you have kids, you’ll be much more risk-averse, and therefore see why I prefer to keep the system as is” and then we could have gone on to reasons about why one or the other system is risky.
In another case (this time an email exchange on the issue of pricing carbon emissions), someone said I would “get” his point if I would just read the famous Coase paper on externalities. While I hadn’t read it, I was familiar with the arguments in it, and ~99% sure my position accounted for its points, so I kept pressing him to tell me which insight I didn’t fully appreciate. Thankfully, such probing led him to erroneously state what he thought was my opinion, and when I mentioned this, he decided it wouldn’t change my opinion.
It illustrated nothing of the sort. The Sokal affair illustrated that a non-peer-reviewed, non-science journal will publish bad science writing that was believed to be submitted in good faith.
Social Text was not peer-reviewed because they were hoping to… do… something. What Sokal did was similar to stealing everything from a ‘good faith’ vegetable stand and then criticizing its owner for not having enough security.
Noted. In another draft I’ll change this to make the point how easy it is for high-status academics to deal in gibberish. Maybe they didn’t have so much status external to their group of peers, but within it, did they?
What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/noretta.html
“From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn’t prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science—much less sociology of science—is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of one rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a
conveniently credentialed ally'' (as Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted[12]), flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions, and attacked their
enemies″.[13]”I’d forgotten that Sokal himself admitted that much about it—thanks for the cite.
It’s unclear what you mean by both “Bayesian” and by “authority” in this sentence. If a person is “Bayesian”, does it give “authority” for condescension?
There clearly is some truth to the claim that being around longer sometimes allows to arrive at more accurate beliefs, including more accurate intuitive assessment of the situation, if you are not down a crazy road in the particular domain. It’s not a very strong evidence, and it can’t defeat many forms of more direct evidence pointing in the contrary direction, but sometimes it’s an OK heuristic, especially if you are not aware of other evidence (“ask the elder”).
Maybe “authority” is the wrong word. What I mean is that the opponent making this claim is dismissing my stance as wrong, because of my supposed less experience. It means that they believe that truth follows from collecting anecdotes. They ascertain that because they have more anecdotes, they are correct, and I am incorrect. For not being rational, we can’t trust their standard of truth to dismiss my position as wrong, since their whole methodology is hopelessly flawed.
Your core claim seems to be that you should dismiss statements (as opposed to arguments) by “irrational” people. This is a more general idea, basically unrelated to amount of their personal experience or other features of typical conversations which you discuss in your comment.
If someone’s argument, and therefore position, is irrational, how can we trust them to give honest and accurate criticism of other arguments?
At which point you are completely forsaking your original argument (rightfully or wrongly, which is a separate concern), which is the idea of my critical comment above. It’s unclear what you are arguing about, if your conclusion is equivalent to a much simpler premise that you have to assume independently of the argument. This sounds like rationalization (again, no matter whether the conclusion-advice-heuristic is correct or not).
OK, let me break it down.
I take “life experience” to mean a haphazard collection of anecdotes.
Claims from haphazardly collected anecdotes do not constitute legitimate evidence, though I concede those claims do often have positive correlations with true facts.
As such, relying on “life experience” is not rational. The point about condescension is tangential. The whole rhetorical technique is frustrating, because there is no way to move on from it. If “life experience” were legitimate evidence for the claim, the argument would not be able to continue until I have gained more “life experience,” and who decides how much would be sufficient? Would it be until I come around? Once we throw the standard of evidence out, we’re outside the bounds of rational discourse.
I don’t think that’s something that most people who think “life experience” is valuable would agree to.
It might be profitable for you to revise your criteria for what constitutes legitimate evidence. Throwing away information that has a positive correlation with the thing you’re wondering about seems a bit hasty.
I am calling attention to reverting to “life experience” as recourse in an argument. If someone strays to that, it’s clear that we’re no longer considering evidence for whatever the argument is about. Referring back to “life experience” is far too nebulous to take as any evidence anything.
As for what constitutes legitimate evidence, even if anecdotes can correlate, anecdotes are not evidence!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results
Anecdotes are rational evidence, but not scientific evidence.
For a debate involving complex religious, scientific, or political arguments, this won’t suffice.
Let’s say I’m debating someone on whether or not poltergeists exist.
All,
Thanks for the votes. So, I’m not exactly sure how the karma system works. On the main page I see articles from people with less than 50 points, and I see prominent users that have nonsensically low counts. Do I still need 50 points to post a main article?
Users’ karma is only displayed on their user page (and the top contributors list). The number in the header of an article or comment is the score for that post only. Does this help?
Yes, thank you.