Excellent post—it makes me wish that the system gave out a limited number of super-votes, like 1 for every 20 karma, so that I could vote this up twice.
I hope you don’t mind, but I did a quick edit to insert “a choice of” before “two drugs to test”, because that wasn’t clear on my first reading. (Feel free to revert if you prefer your original wording.) Also edited the self-deception tag to self_deception per previous standard.
Thank you. Since I learned practically everything I know about rationality either from you or from books you recommended, I’m very happy to earn your approval...but also a little amused, since I consciously tried to copy your writing style as much as I could without actually inserting litanies.
Heh! I almost wrote in my original comment: “How odd, an Eliezer post on Standard Biases written by Yvain”, but worried that it might look like stealing credit, or that you might not like the comparison. I futzed around, deleted, and finally wrote “excellent post” instead. The wish for two upvotes is because my Standard Biases posts are the ones I feel least guilty about writing.
Surely you have enough of a following here that you effectively have super-votes? Just go ahead and tell people you’re voting something up, and that should generate at least two or three votes for free.
Also, ‘promoting’ an article seems to be a good enough option.
The idea of super-votes sounds similar to the system they have at everything2, where users are awarded a certain number of “upvotes” and a certain number of “cools” every day, depending on their level. An upvote/downvote adds/subtracts 1 point to their equivalent of karma for the post and a Cool gives the player a certain number of points, is displayed as “Cooled” on the post and is promoted to their main page.
(I reposted this as a reply because I was unfamiliar with the posting system when I first wrote it.)
Note that the karma system for Everything2 has changed recently. Specifically, because of abuse, downvoting no long subtracts karma.
‘Cools’ add twenty karma now. In the past, they only added three or so. This was changed to reflect the comparative scarcity of cools. Where in the old system, highly ranked users could cool multiple things per day, in the new system everyone is limited to one per day.
Their rationalization for these changes are listed here. I hope this information proves a bit useful to other people designing karma systems; at E2, we’ve been experimenting with karma systems since 1999. It’d be a shame to have that go to waste.
I like the sound of that system PaulG. I like the idea that I have to ‘spend’ a finite resource to vote something up or down. Having a finite number of supervotes or cools would make me consider my voting more thoughtfully.
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.
Excellent post—it makes me wish that the system gave out a limited number of super-votes, like 1 for every 20 karma, so that I could vote this up twice.
I hope you don’t mind, but I did a quick edit to insert “a choice of” before “two drugs to test”, because that wasn’t clear on my first reading. (Feel free to revert if you prefer your original wording.) Also edited the self-deception tag to self_deception per previous standard.
Thank you. Since I learned practically everything I know about rationality either from you or from books you recommended, I’m very happy to earn your approval...but also a little amused, since I consciously tried to copy your writing style as much as I could without actually inserting litanies.
Heh! I almost wrote in my original comment: “How odd, an Eliezer post on Standard Biases written by Yvain”, but worried that it might look like stealing credit, or that you might not like the comparison. I futzed around, deleted, and finally wrote “excellent post” instead. The wish for two upvotes is because my Standard Biases posts are the ones I feel least guilty about writing.
I must admit that when I wrote my reply I was operating on the assumption that I was replying to Eliezer. In fact, I even adressed it as such.
Fortunately I checked to see that nobody else had written the same point I was making before I posted.
Brilliant work Yvain!
Surely you have enough of a following here that you effectively have super-votes? Just go ahead and tell people you’re voting something up, and that should generate at least two or three votes for free.
Also, ‘promoting’ an article seems to be a good enough option.
The idea of super-votes sounds similar to the system they have at everything2, where users are awarded a certain number of “upvotes” and a certain number of “cools” every day, depending on their level. An upvote/downvote adds/subtracts 1 point to their equivalent of karma for the post and a Cool gives the player a certain number of points, is displayed as “Cooled” on the post and is promoted to their main page.
(I reposted this as a reply because I was unfamiliar with the posting system when I first wrote it.)
Note that the karma system for Everything2 has changed recently. Specifically, because of abuse, downvoting no long subtracts karma.
‘Cools’ add twenty karma now. In the past, they only added three or so. This was changed to reflect the comparative scarcity of cools. Where in the old system, highly ranked users could cool multiple things per day, in the new system everyone is limited to one per day.
Their rationalization for these changes are listed here. I hope this information proves a bit useful to other people designing karma systems; at E2, we’ve been experimenting with karma systems since 1999. It’d be a shame to have that go to waste.
I like the sound of that system PaulG. I like the idea that I have to ‘spend’ a finite resource to vote something up or down. Having a finite number of supervotes or cools would make me consider my voting more thoughtfully.
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.