I second the idea of super-votes. IMHO you(EY) should be allowed to super-vote how much you want since I trust your judgement as do most of the others, I suppose.
“you(EY) should be allowed to super-vote how much you want since I trust your judgement as do most of the others, I suppose.”
what have we learned about power corrupting people? EY did a lovely post ( http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/every-cause-wan.html ) on how any human group innately tends towards the standard hunter-gatherer tribe habits; in this case the tendency being to elevate the mere human tribal chief to godlike status…
/”You might think that a belief system which praised “reason” and “rationality” and “individualism” would have gained some kind of special immunity, somehow...?”/
Also, I wonder how much Yvain’s rather high score of 31 has to do with EY’s good review. “jeez, Eli said it was good, I’d better vote for it...”
I wonder how much Yvain’s rather high score of 31 has to do with EY’s good review.
I’ve noticed this too, and that comments by higher status users, particularly Eliezer, tend to be voted higher than IMHO equal quality comments by less popular users...
power corrupting people?
...but it’s hardly Eliezer’s fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.
It could also be a kind of unconscious Bayesian adjustment. If a comment is written by someone who tends to write high-quality comments, that increases the probability that this comment is high-quality from what you’d estimate just from reading the text. But I’d rather we didn’t take that into account—we should mark comments based on own opinion of whether it’s high quality, not our estimate of the probability of it being high-quality based on info like that, or the voting would resemble that of a Keynesian beauty contest.
A dream feature, not something I seriously expect the people at Tricycle to work on: I want an option for a voluntary “blind mode” in preferences. People in blind mode wouldn’t be able to see the poster of a comment’s name or the comment’s current karma score until they either voted up, voted down, or clicked a new “vote neutral” button; after voting, the poster and karma score would be revealed but the vote could not be changed.
Reason: I find myself slightly tempted to vote up the articles of people who voted up my articles as a form of reciprocity, or else to vote up the articles of people who didn’t vote up my articles to prove I’m not doing that. I’m sure on an unconscious level the temptation is much worse. Plus this would solve the information cascades problem.
″...but it’s hardly Eliezer’s fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.”
Yes, this is true. If he hadn’t written the “every cause wants to be a cult” post, I would probably also be busy requesting that he give himself absolute power. My comment was more aimed at roland.
Fortunately there’s still plenty of people who overcome this bias. I’ve the dubious honour of writing the only post Eliezer’s actually condemned as inappropriate for Less Wrong and should never have existed. I was afraid that would trigger a downgrade avalanche, but thanks to some excellent links others posted it maintained a positive score.
In as much as I trust Eleizer’s judgement, I’m not sure I would want him to be taken above and beyond the vote system. Far better to have Eleizer’s implicit awesomeness and right to judge emerge from within the same well designed system.
I second the idea of super-votes. IMHO you(EY) should be allowed to super-vote how much you want since I trust your judgement as do most of the others, I suppose.
I respectfully disagree with the latter part.
“you(EY) should be allowed to super-vote how much you want since I trust your judgement as do most of the others, I suppose.”
what have we learned about power corrupting people? EY did a lovely post ( http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/every-cause-wan.html ) on how any human group innately tends towards the standard hunter-gatherer tribe habits; in this case the tendency being to elevate the mere human tribal chief to godlike status…
/”You might think that a belief system which praised “reason” and “rationality” and “individualism” would have gained some kind of special immunity, somehow...?”/
Also, I wonder how much Yvain’s rather high score of 31 has to do with EY’s good review. “jeez, Eli said it was good, I’d better vote for it...”
I’ve noticed this too, and that comments by higher status users, particularly Eliezer, tend to be voted higher than IMHO equal quality comments by less popular users...
...but it’s hardly Eliezer’s fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.
It could also be a kind of unconscious Bayesian adjustment. If a comment is written by someone who tends to write high-quality comments, that increases the probability that this comment is high-quality from what you’d estimate just from reading the text. But I’d rather we didn’t take that into account—we should mark comments based on own opinion of whether it’s high quality, not our estimate of the probability of it being high-quality based on info like that, or the voting would resemble that of a Keynesian beauty contest.
A dream feature, not something I seriously expect the people at Tricycle to work on: I want an option for a voluntary “blind mode” in preferences. People in blind mode wouldn’t be able to see the poster of a comment’s name or the comment’s current karma score until they either voted up, voted down, or clicked a new “vote neutral” button; after voting, the poster and karma score would be revealed but the vote could not be changed.
Reason: I find myself slightly tempted to vote up the articles of people who voted up my articles as a form of reciprocity, or else to vote up the articles of people who didn’t vote up my articles to prove I’m not doing that. I’m sure on an unconscious level the temptation is much worse. Plus this would solve the information cascades problem.
See Marcello’s antikibitzer.
How do you know who voted up your articles?
The default setting is that votes are public—you can check a user’s profile page to see what he liked/disliked.
″...but it’s hardly Eliezer’s fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.”
Yes, this is true. If he hadn’t written the “every cause wants to be a cult” post, I would probably also be busy requesting that he give himself absolute power. My comment was more aimed at roland.
Fortunately there’s still plenty of people who overcome this bias. I’ve the dubious honour of writing the only post Eliezer’s actually condemned as inappropriate for Less Wrong and should never have existed. I was afraid that would trigger a downgrade avalanche, but thanks to some excellent links others posted it maintained a positive score.
In as much as I trust Eleizer’s judgement, I’m not sure I would want him to be taken above and beyond the vote system. Far better to have Eleizer’s implicit awesomeness and right to judge emerge from within the same well designed system.