At the last less-wrong meet-up I attended, several people noted that they did not even comment for fear of getting negative karma on comments. I was one of only two people out of 12 with karma over 25, and some of these people are long-time readers. People who avoid posting based on the new rule might not be karma optimizing, but then you need to consider what’s the purpose of karma to begin with—is it to create a hierarchy based on score, or is it to discourage trolls and encourage useful comment? If it’s the latter, I think the new rule will discourage more first-time posters than it will encourage, as 5 downvotes on a post will literally wipe away what might be a few month’s worth of collected karma from shy commenters.
I spend half an hour on average crafting a LW comment and don’t post half the comments I write. Usually, I’m anxious post-comment but positively surprised by karma.
Note that maybe commenting fear causes the high quality of LW discussion.
I suspect the same motivations will apply even in the absence of a direct numerical representation of people’s peer’s opinions. I, for example, posted a lot less than I would have liked to on The Octagon because I feared verbal or even non-verbalized disapproval.
I occasionally post despite fears of disapproval, but then immediately after posting my anxiety levels will become so uncomfortably high I delete the comment. Perhaps some people have noticed me doing this, but if they knew how anxious I felt I believe they would understand. It’s kind of neurotic...
I also have some social anxiety as well. A usual amount, I think. And then I tell myself that posting on Less Wrong (which is not the ‘real world’) would be good desensitizing training. I think it has helped some, but occasionally it has the opposite effect. I once had a minor panic attack at a conference moments before giving a talk -- not because of the talk, but because I realized I wouldn’t be able to delete a comment or a post I just submitted and thought I might regret.
Incidentally, the chances of me making a comment (and leaving it) doesn’t correlate as much with my perceived quality of my comments as much as with my anxiety threshold at that time. Since I’m not very good at gauging my anxiety response, I tend to always rewrite my comments more and more conservatively until the first idea is all but lost. Then I’ll submit the comment just because I spent so much time on it.
(Please don’t respond that I probably shouldn’t bother commenting; I kind of know that. I’m curious if the whole thing improves over time.)
Heh. I once drove ~45 minutes to a Less Wrong meetup in Santa Clara, made a U-turn at the end of the block the house was on and drove straight back home.
Well… I would say that it was one part not knowing what to expect—was I just going to mingle in this house full of extremely bright people for a few hours? I wasn’t sure I was going to know what to do with myself.
It was one part doubt about my own.. uh.. qualifications for being there. I haven’t commented much on my main account, nor made a submission (I hope you’ll forgive me for using a throwaway account for these comments). I’m a college senior whose done well in every class (from lit. to programming to organic chem. to math), but I don’t yet have a passion, nor area of expertise, so I wasn’t sure that I would be able to contribute much… or even last long (i.e. be able to carry on) in a conversation with the opinionated and up-to-date scholars there.
I guess the advice I would give would be this: cater more to shy / socially anxious people. Maybe have a snippet you can paste at the end of every announcement, just summarizing what goes on there and who all is welcome, what the ecology / environment is like, etc. Tell people what the sufficient conditions are for their being welcome.
Please don’t respond that I probably shouldn’t bother commenting; I kind of know that.
If you have a social anxiety problem then i expect that reassurances from a stranger on the internet won’t have much effect. But if it’s any help, then from a glance at your user overview page it looks like what you say has a generally positive reception. So it looks like you can write here without worrying about disapproval, based on your karma score at least.
I’m right there with you on this. As taa22 mentions below, there are often things that I do, and put a great amount of energy or expense into, only to give up for a variety of reasons (usually self-consciousness, which is the strangest thing to me, since I spent most of the 1980s on a stage of one kind or another, at the center of many people’s attention).
I’ve noticed that I tend to do better when I try to censor (Allcorn, got it right this time) myself less than I usually tend to censor myself (I self-censor to a great degree, which is exactly what it sounds like you are doing).
This brings two issues to my mind:
• Are you destroying what you originally intended to say (in which case, I will not touch my original thoughts, as written the first time)? or
• Are you strengthening your original intended thoughts (in which case, revision can often be a good idea. If this revision is not done in an attempt to censor oneself, but to further reveal a thought)?
I just recalled something… There are exercises that actors & musicians often do before they go onto stage in order to decease stress over potential mistakes. Is it the case that you might find something f this sort beneficial? It seems to me that irrational fears are often best countered by direct action, even if it seems to have nothing to do with the fears in question (this is what your typical theatrical warm-up exercises are geared to address)
At the last less-wrong meet-up I attended, several people noted that they did not even comment for fear of getting negative karma on comments. I was one of only two people out of 12 with karma over 25, and some of these people are long-time readers. People who avoid posting based on the new rule might not be karma optimizing, but then you need to consider what’s the purpose of karma to begin with—is it to create a hierarchy based on score, or is it to discourage trolls and encourage useful comment? If it’s the latter, I think the new rule will discourage more first-time posters than it will encourage, as 5 downvotes on a post will literally wipe away what might be a few month’s worth of collected karma from shy commenters.
I spend half an hour on average crafting a LW comment and don’t post half the comments I write. Usually, I’m anxious post-comment but positively surprised by karma.
Note that maybe commenting fear causes the high quality of LW discussion.
I suspect the same motivations will apply even in the absence of a direct numerical representation of people’s peer’s opinions. I, for example, posted a lot less than I would have liked to on The Octagon because I feared verbal or even non-verbalized disapproval.
I occasionally post despite fears of disapproval, but then immediately after posting my anxiety levels will become so uncomfortably high I delete the comment. Perhaps some people have noticed me doing this, but if they knew how anxious I felt I believe they would understand. It’s kind of neurotic...
I also have some social anxiety as well. A usual amount, I think. And then I tell myself that posting on Less Wrong (which is not the ‘real world’) would be good desensitizing training. I think it has helped some, but occasionally it has the opposite effect. I once had a minor panic attack at a conference moments before giving a talk -- not because of the talk, but because I realized I wouldn’t be able to delete a comment or a post I just submitted and thought I might regret.
Incidentally, the chances of me making a comment (and leaving it) doesn’t correlate as much with my perceived quality of my comments as much as with my anxiety threshold at that time. Since I’m not very good at gauging my anxiety response, I tend to always rewrite my comments more and more conservatively until the first idea is all but lost. Then I’ll submit the comment just because I spent so much time on it.
(Please don’t respond that I probably shouldn’t bother commenting; I kind of know that. I’m curious if the whole thing improves over time.)
Heh. I once drove ~45 minutes to a Less Wrong meetup in Santa Clara, made a U-turn at the end of the block the house was on and drove straight back home.
Is there anything useful you can say about anything we could change that would stop that from happening again?
Well… I would say that it was one part not knowing what to expect—was I just going to mingle in this house full of extremely bright people for a few hours? I wasn’t sure I was going to know what to do with myself.
It was one part doubt about my own.. uh.. qualifications for being there. I haven’t commented much on my main account, nor made a submission (I hope you’ll forgive me for using a throwaway account for these comments). I’m a college senior whose done well in every class (from lit. to programming to organic chem. to math), but I don’t yet have a passion, nor area of expertise, so I wasn’t sure that I would be able to contribute much… or even last long (i.e. be able to carry on) in a conversation with the opinionated and up-to-date scholars there.
I guess the advice I would give would be this: cater more to shy / socially anxious people. Maybe have a snippet you can paste at the end of every announcement, just summarizing what goes on there and who all is welcome, what the ecology / environment is like, etc. Tell people what the sufficient conditions are for their being welcome.
If you have a social anxiety problem then i expect that reassurances from a stranger on the internet won’t have much effect. But if it’s any help, then from a glance at your user overview page it looks like what you say has a generally positive reception. So it looks like you can write here without worrying about disapproval, based on your karma score at least.
This seems like a problem that some other online community would have encountered before. Is there a standard solution for it?
I’m right there with you on this. As taa22 mentions below, there are often things that I do, and put a great amount of energy or expense into, only to give up for a variety of reasons (usually self-consciousness, which is the strangest thing to me, since I spent most of the 1980s on a stage of one kind or another, at the center of many people’s attention).
I’ve noticed that I tend to do better when I try to censor (Allcorn, got it right this time) myself less than I usually tend to censor myself (I self-censor to a great degree, which is exactly what it sounds like you are doing).
This brings two issues to my mind:
• Are you destroying what you originally intended to say (in which case, I will not touch my original thoughts, as written the first time)? or • Are you strengthening your original intended thoughts (in which case, revision can often be a good idea. If this revision is not done in an attempt to censor oneself, but to further reveal a thought)?
I just recalled something… There are exercises that actors & musicians often do before they go onto stage in order to decease stress over potential mistakes. Is it the case that you might find something f this sort beneficial? It seems to me that irrational fears are often best countered by direct action, even if it seems to have nothing to do with the fears in question (this is what your typical theatrical warm-up exercises are geared to address)