I made a conscious decision on Reddit, and I’m going to keep it here, to completely ignore votes I’m getting for comments, both up and down. I’m going to ignore getting −10 and +10 equally.
One of your examples of one of your comments being unfairly downvoted is
It was designed for Lisp machines, without any regard to efficiency on lowly hardware.
You support this with a link to an article by Brooks and Gabriel, from 1984, that was part of the infighting of the ongoing standardisation process. They claim
The cost of invisible pointers was ignored for micro-coded machines and underestimated for stock architectures.
Later, on page 16
As a conscession to non-micro-coded machines, vectors, simple vectors and simple strings were included as types. The resulting tangle of types … is clearly a political compromise...
So part of Brooks and Gabriels critique is the ugliness that has resulted from considerations of efficiency on lowly hardware. Your precis is rather rough.
They won their fight over invisible pointers that year. On page one of Common Lisp the Language, also from 1984, we find
Common Lisp intentionally excludes features that cannot be implemented easily on a broad class of machines. On the one hand, features that are difficult or expensive to implement on hardware without special microcode are avoided or provided in a more abstract and efficiently implementable form. (Examples of this are the invisible forwarding pointers and locatives of Zetalisp. Some of the problems that they solve are addressed in different ways in Common Lisp.) On the other hand, features that are useful only on certain ordinary'' orcommercial″ processors are avoided or made optional. (An example of this is the type declaration facility, which is useful in some implementations and completely ignored in others. Type declarations are completely optional and for correct programs affect only efficiency, not semantics.) Common Lisp is designed to make it easy to write programs that depend as little as possible on machine-specific characteristics, such as word length, while allowing some variety of implementation techniques.
so your comment was 23 years out of date.
One of the consequences of trolling is that many people have wearied of posting long corrections to short posts. They don’t want to get trolled, but how can they avoid it? One simple algorithm is to assess the length and construction of the post in relation to a possible reply. If the original post is brief and if it is constructed so that a reply would have to be considerably longer just to untangle the original posts confusion, then people will just mod down and move on.
If you don’t want this happening to your posts I suggest signalling sincerity by putting work into them. If, for example, you tell the story of how you came by your beliefs you will reassure your troll-ridden readers
Well, no, over here there are an unusual concentration of atypically rational people. −10 really ought to mean you screwed up horrendously. You’d be unwise to just dump the input.
I’ve noticed that many of the meta-posts here are premised on the belief that being interested in rationality (or being interesting in identifying oneself with a community of “rationalists”) is strongly correlated with actually being more rational. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were indeed the case, as compared to average; however, I’d be very hesitant to simply assume that people here are “atypically rational” as compared to, say, another Internet community comprising similarly high-IQ individuals, but with no special interest in rationality per se.
I don’t really believe people here are atypically rational, at least I haven’t seen any evidence for it so I’m going to assume they behave just like on every other forum and use the vote buttons emotionally.
From my observations, other than spam and other garbage, negative score on Reddit almost always means violating some groupthink taboo. Annoying people by violating their taboos doesn’t count as “screwing up horrendously” according to my criteria, self-censorship on the other hand does. I know being nicer in tone lets me get away with violating some taboos, and it pretty much doesn’t matter for groupthink-aligned comments. That’s less problematic than self-censorship of content, but it’s still groupthink-directed adjustment of my comments, something I would rather avoid.
“I know being nicer in tone lets me get away with violating some taboos,”
Niceness is essential.
It is part of leaving a way for the other person (or you) to change your mind.
It is even more important when discussing life-and-death issues.
You have to be able to say “I think your proposal would cause millions of needless deaths, and my perception of your attitude about this makes me think you’re a monster.”...WITHOUT the discussion exploding.
Because generally you’re not talking to idiots or monsters, and working out a better common understanding is the only thing that will bring all parties closer to the truth.
Well, I would say it’s a case of me taking an outside view (predicting use of voting on lesswrong based on multiple other similar communities with similar voting systems, like particular reddits), and you taking an inside view (predicting use of voting on lesswrong based on your perceived characteristics of lesswrong users).
If my interpretation of source of our disagreement is correct, I think outside view is much more likely to be accurate. And in case anybody wonders, I haven’t downvoted any comment on lesswrong ever (only one post I found uninteresting), but I might still be biased towards upvoting comments I disagree with less often than ones I agree with, so I might be biased in use of voting buttons too.
While this site isn’t Reddit, absolutely anyone who’s registered can down or upvote posts. This may include people who didn’t evaluate the post, people who are below the sanity line we’d wish of members of LW, sock puppets and of course, even for a decent rationalist, some posts may still elicit a strong emotional response, upon which we may be tempted to act. Sometimes we won’t even notice we did.
And for instance in the past two days I’ve seen quite a few posts downvoted because the people who made them weren’t acting like we would expect rationalists would, or simply weren’t nice and careful enough with their wording. I was tempted to upvote them on the idea that so long as such posts only represent a minority of the site’s output, rationalists could just use that as information, and update on it. Interesting cases of muddled thinking and biases to learn from.
I decided against it since I noticed this was mainly a rationalization, that my main motivation was rooted my desire to “help” in what I emotionally perceived as a case of “injustice”. On second thought I decided that the community’s vote should in most case be better than my opinion, unless I had a concrete, real reason to the contrary.
I rarely upvote anything, and almost never downvote anyway. I use the first to push up ideas I find interesting. I don’t usually find enough real good reasons to use the latter.
To get back to my point though, which are our safeguards against people operating multiple accounts, or who simply registered here without having a real idea of what was going on ?
The idea of not just voting, but also explaining why we choose one way or the other, seems interesting.
I’m usually pretty quick to downvote low-quality posts that I don’t want to see again, but which I’m afraid others will refrain from downvoting because the comment is also disagreeing with the groupthink and the others will start questioning their own correct quality judgment.
What should really get the upvotes are the high-quality comments that disagree with the groupthink. These are the precious heroic ones. Don’t set that standard too low!
I made a conscious decision on Reddit, and I’m going to keep it here, to completely ignore votes I’m getting for comments, both up and down. I’m going to ignore getting −10 and +10 equally.
Here’s a bit of groupthink downvote examples from Programming Reddit
One of your examples of one of your comments being unfairly downvoted is
You support this with a link to an article by Brooks and Gabriel, from 1984, that was part of the infighting of the ongoing standardisation process. They claim
Later, on page 16
So part of Brooks and Gabriels critique is the ugliness that has resulted from considerations of efficiency on lowly hardware. Your precis is rather rough.
They won their fight over invisible pointers that year. On page one of Common Lisp the Language, also from 1984, we find
so your comment was 23 years out of date.
One of the consequences of trolling is that many people have wearied of posting long corrections to short posts. They don’t want to get trolled, but how can they avoid it? One simple algorithm is to assess the length and construction of the post in relation to a possible reply. If the original post is brief and if it is constructed so that a reply would have to be considerably longer just to untangle the original posts confusion, then people will just mod down and move on.
If you don’t want this happening to your posts I suggest signalling sincerity by putting work into them. If, for example, you tell the story of how you came by your beliefs you will reassure your troll-ridden readers
Well, no, over here there are an unusual concentration of atypically rational people. −10 really ought to mean you screwed up horrendously. You’d be unwise to just dump the input.
You can always edit the post to beg explanations.
I’ve noticed that many of the meta-posts here are premised on the belief that being interested in rationality (or being interesting in identifying oneself with a community of “rationalists”) is strongly correlated with actually being more rational. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were indeed the case, as compared to average; however, I’d be very hesitant to simply assume that people here are “atypically rational” as compared to, say, another Internet community comprising similarly high-IQ individuals, but with no special interest in rationality per se.
“Well, no, over here there are an unusual concentration of atypically rational people.”
Thank you, JulianMorrison, for bringing a ray of humor and sunshine into my dark and gloomy day.
Now I think I’ll learn more about wisdom by visiting a Mensa chat room and asking the people there how to be smarter.
I don’t really believe people here are atypically rational, at least I haven’t seen any evidence for it so I’m going to assume they behave just like on every other forum and use the vote buttons emotionally.
From my observations, other than spam and other garbage, negative score on Reddit almost always means violating some groupthink taboo. Annoying people by violating their taboos doesn’t count as “screwing up horrendously” according to my criteria, self-censorship on the other hand does. I know being nicer in tone lets me get away with violating some taboos, and it pretty much doesn’t matter for groupthink-aligned comments. That’s less problematic than self-censorship of content, but it’s still groupthink-directed adjustment of my comments, something I would rather avoid.
“I know being nicer in tone lets me get away with violating some taboos,”
Niceness is essential. It is part of leaving a way for the other person (or you) to change your mind. It is even more important when discussing life-and-death issues.
You have to be able to say “I think your proposal would cause millions of needless deaths, and my perception of your attitude about this makes me think you’re a monster.”...WITHOUT the discussion exploding.
Because generally you’re not talking to idiots or monsters, and working out a better common understanding is the only thing that will bring all parties closer to the truth.
Sometimes it just means you’re fucking whining.
This site is not Reddit. You got a downvote for sloppy generalizing.
Well, I would say it’s a case of me taking an outside view (predicting use of voting on lesswrong based on multiple other similar communities with similar voting systems, like particular reddits), and you taking an inside view (predicting use of voting on lesswrong based on your perceived characteristics of lesswrong users).
If my interpretation of source of our disagreement is correct, I think outside view is much more likely to be accurate. And in case anybody wonders, I haven’t downvoted any comment on lesswrong ever (only one post I found uninteresting), but I might still be biased towards upvoting comments I disagree with less often than ones I agree with, so I might be biased in use of voting buttons too.
While this site isn’t Reddit, absolutely anyone who’s registered can down or upvote posts. This may include people who didn’t evaluate the post, people who are below the sanity line we’d wish of members of LW, sock puppets and of course, even for a decent rationalist, some posts may still elicit a strong emotional response, upon which we may be tempted to act. Sometimes we won’t even notice we did.
And for instance in the past two days I’ve seen quite a few posts downvoted because the people who made them weren’t acting like we would expect rationalists would, or simply weren’t nice and careful enough with their wording. I was tempted to upvote them on the idea that so long as such posts only represent a minority of the site’s output, rationalists could just use that as information, and update on it. Interesting cases of muddled thinking and biases to learn from.
I decided against it since I noticed this was mainly a rationalization, that my main motivation was rooted my desire to “help” in what I emotionally perceived as a case of “injustice”. On second thought I decided that the community’s vote should in most case be better than my opinion, unless I had a concrete, real reason to the contrary.
I rarely upvote anything, and almost never downvote anyway. I use the first to push up ideas I find interesting. I don’t usually find enough real good reasons to use the latter.
To get back to my point though, which are our safeguards against people operating multiple accounts, or who simply registered here without having a real idea of what was going on ?
The idea of not just voting, but also explaining why we choose one way or the other, seems interesting.
I’m usually pretty quick to downvote low-quality posts that I don’t want to see again, but which I’m afraid others will refrain from downvoting because the comment is also disagreeing with the groupthink and the others will start questioning their own correct quality judgment.
What should really get the upvotes are the high-quality comments that disagree with the groupthink. These are the precious heroic ones. Don’t set that standard too low!
I hope that there is a site admin running a few statistical tests to look for abuses of the system.
I hope there’s someone running a few statistical tests on the site admin.
Of course, if the site owner chooses to use it in a particular way, is that really abuse?