I don’t really get why people downvote at all. I don’t do so unless I feel very strongly about something—a comment explaining my disagreement or disapproval is more productive, doesn’t make the downvotee feel bad, and I frequently get karma because people will upvote my comment. Win-win-win.
Asymmetric voting reduces the informativeness of the karma ratings. See also EY’s point here: that if views are distributed evenly, but people speak up only when they’re on one of the sides, then you get the wrong impression about the consensus.
I rarely if ever downvote someone’s initial post on a conversation branch, even if poorly formed. I’ll ask them to clarify their position and if they have a massive rationality failure in their response to this THEN I downvote.
I try to vote according to policies I think of as “Pro-social Content Promotion” mixed with “Debate Judgement” mixed with “Personal Appreciation Sessions”.
A personal appreciation session involves no downvoting and is the opposite of karmassassination, except its not indiscriminate upvoting—instead I work through someone’s oeuvre looking for unappreciated diamonds to upvote. Mostly I do this for newbies with new and interesting perspectives who I want to come back and say more in the same vein.
The first two policies can involve downvoting. They require making relative judgements (between sibling content for promotion and between parent-child content for judging) and then voting so as to nudge the content closer to my ideal. If a superior comment has few votes relative to a worse comment, I’ll vote the better one up and the worse one down. If I come back later and the relative votes have become too unbalanced some other way (say with sibling comments of mixed quality bubbling into the system), I may reverse votes to bring the total closer to my ideal again. However, I use 0 as a floor, so most of my voting involves trying to pick N/2 comments with 0, 1, or 2 votes to upvote from among the N that I found at that level… to upvote all but one “0 voted” comment would inject relatively few bits into the system, whereas upvoting roughly half of them maximizes the informativeness of my votes :-)
The only things I push negative are things which I believe actively lower the sanity waterline of the community by bringing up issues we are unlikely to be able to handle reasonably (for example “politics is the mind killer” triggers) and then I use −4 as the target value for “the least offensive such thing” and only go deeper into negative if many negative comments are siblings, to express gradations of displeasure (-4, −5, −6… which basically never happens in practice). Mostly I upvote things that are already negative where someone else presumably “didn’t like it” but I think it’s “merely of low quality” rather than actively waterline threatening.
This is exactly what I do, in every detail, except that I use −3 as my least negative target for least offensive, and I have an additional inclination to give a point for effort to what look like extensively edited and-worked on comments that have 0 net votes, even if the obvious effort was not obviously well spent.
I don’t do so unless I feel very strongly about something—a comment explaining my disagreement or disapproval is more productive
Sometimes, sometimes not. If I see a comment that’s most likely wrong but sounds belligerent, confused or pedantic (or was posted by someone with a track record of being belligerent, confused or pedantic) then I sometimes predict that posting a reply would just suck me into a futile, time-wasting argument. In those cases I happily downvote without bothering to reply. (Other times I prefer to reply to and downvote very misleading comments.)
a comment explaining my disagreement or disapproval is more productive
Also more costly and sometimes useless, if somebody else has already explained the same reasons.
doesn’t make the downvotee feel bad
Disagreement often makes people feel bad, even if explained (and sometimes more because it is explained).
and I frequently get karma because people will upvote my comment
If all people never downvoted like you suggest, having positive karma would mean nothing. Paradoxically, the worth of karma you get for not downvoting depends on other users’ occasional downvoting.
I agree with you, but also further believe that karma is a meaningless metric for sorting comments and etc. A cursory glance of the highest karma users demonstrates that it’s mostly used for political reasons.
A cursory glance of the highest karma users demonstrates that it’s mostly used for political reasons.
Would you please elaborate on that? I’m somewhat new, but I don’t see it that way at all.
Edit: Also, what do you mean by political? Upvoting because you agree with the authors views on, say, cryonics, and not the way in which he reached those views? I’ve rarely seen something that would traditionally be described as political discussed on here.
Edit again: The only example I can think of is this.
My experience with karma-based community systems in the past leads me to believe frequently people upvote things on the basis of who wrote them. There does exist a kibitzer, but 1) one loses valuable information in the process and 2) the people swayed by political values like this are the not very likely to use it.
I suppose this post is evidence that the opposite direction is true as well.
Edit: I suppose “tribalistic” is a word with closer connotations than “political.”
I think there’s probably merit to your point, although I’d like to think that’s not as true for LessWrong. But I probably don’t have enough experience here to have a reliable estimate either way. And even if I did, causality is always difficult to determine, etc. But there are certainly examples where what you say is not the case, although they are obviously not the majority. Often I think that people are more inclined to downvote someone like Eliezer who has the Karma to spare it—had I made Eliezer’s comment, I highly doubt it would have been downvoted as strongly.
Edit: Perhaps “has the Karma to spare it” is not the best phrasing, but rather “Is also wildly upvoted all the time and won’t feel bad.”
Why all the karma bashing? Yes, absolutely, people will upvote or downvote for political reasons and be heavily influenced by the name behind the post/comment. All the time. But as far as I can tell, politics is a problem with any evaluation system whatsoever, and karma does remarkably well. In my experience, post and comment scores are strongly correlated with how useful I find them, how much they contribute to my experience of the discussion. And the list of top contributors is full of people who have written posts that I have saved forever, that in many cases irreversibly impacted my thinking. The fact that EY is sometimes deservingly downvoted is a case in point. The abuse described in the original post is unfortunate, but overall the LessWrong system does a difficult job incredibly well.
Often I think that people are more inclined to downvote someone like Eliezer who has the Karma to spare it
I’ve noticed a similar (or worse) effect in my own voting patterns. More than once I’ve neglected to upvote something I thought was good because it had very high karma and was posted by a very-high-karma user. My thought process is something like, “Lukeprog has already gotten more karma for this post than many users have altogether. Does he really need another upvote?”
The largest bias in voting I’ve noticed in my own thinking is when someone else has voted down a comment, and I see no reason it should be either up or down voted. It is very difficult for me to not upvote it to counteract the, in my opinion undeserving, downvote.
I’ve seen voting patterns like that and my example described elsewhere as being, not exactly biases, but a product of there being two or more ways people use the karma system. AFAICT, different people decide to upvote or downvote based on the answer to one of the following questions:
*Is this comment above my threshold of “good enough to upvote,” below my threshold of “bad enough to downvote,” or in between?
*Does this comment need more or fewer karma than it currently has?
*Does having posted this comment make the poster deserving of another karma point (or “more karma points than ey has already gotten from it)?
People who see the karma system more as a tool for ranking comments will probably use question 1 or 2. People who see the karma system as a tool for ranking users will use question 3. Also, people who ask question 1 will probably use the anti-kibitzer, while people who use question 2 probably will not.
I had considered one and two before, and strongly prefer one, but it hadn’t occurred to me that people might operate by three. And I don’t use the anti-kibitzer, mostly because I’m too lazy to get it working, and believe (probably erroneously) that I am not influenced by that. Also, I’d constantly be turning it on and off and then on again, so much so that it would only be frustrating.
I mostly use one, with occasional instances of two. For instance, I never downvoted the Popper troll from a few months ago, because every comment of eirs I saw was already at −20 and downvoting seemed pointless. My not upvoting Lukeprog is mostly two with a little bit of three. I used to use the anti-kibitzer, but it was preventing me from getting to know the other users, and long conversations with three people in them got confusing. I kept having to turn it on and off, and in the browser I had at the time that meant scrolling all the way to the top of the page and losing my place.
I suspect the same thing. Actually I think there are a couple of biases—the name brand association you describe and also an affect I have noticed in myself where I feel inclined to upvote posts that have been upvoted a lot. Following the herd I guess.
If a “famous” poster who regularly accrues a couple dozen or more Karma a day just from popular comments they post would post for a few days under a pseudonym (but otherwise do not post any differently then they would have done) we might get some data about the former affect as you describe it.
I don’t really get why people downvote at all. I don’t do so unless I feel very strongly about something—a comment explaining my disagreement or disapproval is more productive, doesn’t make the downvotee feel bad, and I frequently get karma because people will upvote my comment. Win-win-win.
Asymmetric voting reduces the informativeness of the karma ratings. See also EY’s point here: that if views are distributed evenly, but people speak up only when they’re on one of the sides, then you get the wrong impression about the consensus.
I rarely if ever downvote someone’s initial post on a conversation branch, even if poorly formed. I’ll ask them to clarify their position and if they have a massive rationality failure in their response to this THEN I downvote.
I try to vote according to policies I think of as “Pro-social Content Promotion” mixed with “Debate Judgement” mixed with “Personal Appreciation Sessions”.
A personal appreciation session involves no downvoting and is the opposite of karmassassination, except its not indiscriminate upvoting—instead I work through someone’s oeuvre looking for unappreciated diamonds to upvote. Mostly I do this for newbies with new and interesting perspectives who I want to come back and say more in the same vein.
The first two policies can involve downvoting. They require making relative judgements (between sibling content for promotion and between parent-child content for judging) and then voting so as to nudge the content closer to my ideal. If a superior comment has few votes relative to a worse comment, I’ll vote the better one up and the worse one down. If I come back later and the relative votes have become too unbalanced some other way (say with sibling comments of mixed quality bubbling into the system), I may reverse votes to bring the total closer to my ideal again. However, I use 0 as a floor, so most of my voting involves trying to pick N/2 comments with 0, 1, or 2 votes to upvote from among the N that I found at that level… to upvote all but one “0 voted” comment would inject relatively few bits into the system, whereas upvoting roughly half of them maximizes the informativeness of my votes :-)
The only things I push negative are things which I believe actively lower the sanity waterline of the community by bringing up issues we are unlikely to be able to handle reasonably (for example “politics is the mind killer” triggers) and then I use −4 as the target value for “the least offensive such thing” and only go deeper into negative if many negative comments are siblings, to express gradations of displeasure (-4, −5, −6… which basically never happens in practice). Mostly I upvote things that are already negative where someone else presumably “didn’t like it” but I think it’s “merely of low quality” rather than actively waterline threatening.
This is exactly what I do, in every detail, except that I use −3 as my least negative target for least offensive, and I have an additional inclination to give a point for effort to what look like extensively edited and-worked on comments that have 0 net votes, even if the obvious effort was not obviously well spent.
Sometimes, sometimes not. If I see a comment that’s most likely wrong but sounds belligerent, confused or pedantic (or was posted by someone with a track record of being belligerent, confused or pedantic) then I sometimes predict that posting a reply would just suck me into a futile, time-wasting argument. In those cases I happily downvote without bothering to reply. (Other times I prefer to reply to and downvote very misleading comments.)
Also more costly and sometimes useless, if somebody else has already explained the same reasons.
Disagreement often makes people feel bad, even if explained (and sometimes more because it is explained).
If all people never downvoted like you suggest, having positive karma would mean nothing. Paradoxically, the worth of karma you get for not downvoting depends on other users’ occasional downvoting.
I agree with you, but also further believe that karma is a meaningless metric for sorting comments and etc. A cursory glance of the highest karma users demonstrates that it’s mostly used for political reasons.
Would you please elaborate on that? I’m somewhat new, but I don’t see it that way at all.
Edit: Also, what do you mean by political? Upvoting because you agree with the authors views on, say, cryonics, and not the way in which he reached those views? I’ve rarely seen something that would traditionally be described as political discussed on here.
Edit again: The only example I can think of is this.
My experience with karma-based community systems in the past leads me to believe frequently people upvote things on the basis of who wrote them. There does exist a kibitzer, but 1) one loses valuable information in the process and 2) the people swayed by political values like this are the not very likely to use it.
I suppose this post is evidence that the opposite direction is true as well.
Edit: I suppose “tribalistic” is a word with closer connotations than “political.”
Aside: Every time someone says “would you elaborate,” I think of Derrida.
I think there’s probably merit to your point, although I’d like to think that’s not as true for LessWrong. But I probably don’t have enough experience here to have a reliable estimate either way. And even if I did, causality is always difficult to determine, etc. But there are certainly examples where what you say is not the case, although they are obviously not the majority. Often I think that people are more inclined to downvote someone like Eliezer who has the Karma to spare it—had I made Eliezer’s comment, I highly doubt it would have been downvoted as strongly.
Edit: Perhaps “has the Karma to spare it” is not the best phrasing, but rather “Is also wildly upvoted all the time and won’t feel bad.”
Why all the karma bashing? Yes, absolutely, people will upvote or downvote for political reasons and be heavily influenced by the name behind the post/comment. All the time. But as far as I can tell, politics is a problem with any evaluation system whatsoever, and karma does remarkably well. In my experience, post and comment scores are strongly correlated with how useful I find them, how much they contribute to my experience of the discussion. And the list of top contributors is full of people who have written posts that I have saved forever, that in many cases irreversibly impacted my thinking. The fact that EY is sometimes deservingly downvoted is a case in point. The abuse described in the original post is unfortunate, but overall the LessWrong system does a difficult job incredibly well.
I’ve noticed a similar (or worse) effect in my own voting patterns. More than once I’ve neglected to upvote something I thought was good because it had very high karma and was posted by a very-high-karma user. My thought process is something like, “Lukeprog has already gotten more karma for this post than many users have altogether. Does he really need another upvote?”
The largest bias in voting I’ve noticed in my own thinking is when someone else has voted down a comment, and I see no reason it should be either up or down voted. It is very difficult for me to not upvote it to counteract the, in my opinion undeserving, downvote.
I’ve seen voting patterns like that and my example described elsewhere as being, not exactly biases, but a product of there being two or more ways people use the karma system. AFAICT, different people decide to upvote or downvote based on the answer to one of the following questions:
*Is this comment above my threshold of “good enough to upvote,” below my threshold of “bad enough to downvote,” or in between?
*Does this comment need more or fewer karma than it currently has?
*Does having posted this comment make the poster deserving of another karma point (or “more karma points than ey has already gotten from it)?
People who see the karma system more as a tool for ranking comments will probably use question 1 or 2. People who see the karma system as a tool for ranking users will use question 3. Also, people who ask question 1 will probably use the anti-kibitzer, while people who use question 2 probably will not.
I had considered one and two before, and strongly prefer one, but it hadn’t occurred to me that people might operate by three. And I don’t use the anti-kibitzer, mostly because I’m too lazy to get it working, and believe (probably erroneously) that I am not influenced by that. Also, I’d constantly be turning it on and off and then on again, so much so that it would only be frustrating.
I mostly use one, with occasional instances of two. For instance, I never downvoted the Popper troll from a few months ago, because every comment of eirs I saw was already at −20 and downvoting seemed pointless. My not upvoting Lukeprog is mostly two with a little bit of three. I used to use the anti-kibitzer, but it was preventing me from getting to know the other users, and long conversations with three people in them got confusing. I kept having to turn it on and off, and in the browser I had at the time that meant scrolling all the way to the top of the page and losing my place.
I suspect the same thing. Actually I think there are a couple of biases—the name brand association you describe and also an affect I have noticed in myself where I feel inclined to upvote posts that have been upvoted a lot. Following the herd I guess.
If a “famous” poster who regularly accrues a couple dozen or more Karma a day just from popular comments they post would post for a few days under a pseudonym (but otherwise do not post any differently then they would have done) we might get some data about the former affect as you describe it.