Because quality and truth are separate judgments in practice, and forcing them to be conflated into a single scale is losing information. To the extent that truth is positively correlated with quality this will fall out automatically: highly truthy posts will tend to have high quality. Low quality and high truth are not opposites.
I agree it’s losing information, but that’s something you have to weigh against the inconvenience of multiple dimensions. To the extent that truth is positively correlated with quality you’re just making people click twice, and I suspect clicks are a limited resource.
As I see it the voting system is there to put comments in a convenient order and remove the really bad ones from sight, not to provide opinion poll information.
That’s exactly the point: voting is supposed to put comments in order according to quality, so that you can read the worthwhile comments in a reasonable time. My claim is that the current voting system will not do this well at all and that a dual voting system will be better. (That second bit is just a guess). The opinion poll information is just a nice side effect.
OK, so according to you and Benja the point is to have the agree/disagree buttons there mainly as a lightning rod to prevent agreement from affecting quality votes. That’s a good point, but I wonder if it’s worth it and if there are better ways to accomplish the same thing.
I also wonder if there should be a button labeled “malevolent cantaloupe” so the unserious people will click on that instead of voting.
Because quality and truth are separate judgments in practice, and forcing them to be conflated into a single scale is losing information. To the extent that truth is positively correlated with quality this will fall out automatically: highly truthy posts will tend to have high quality. Low quality and high truth are not opposites.
I agree it’s losing information, but that’s something you have to weigh against the inconvenience of multiple dimensions. To the extent that truth is positively correlated with quality you’re just making people click twice, and I suspect clicks are a limited resource.
As I see it the voting system is there to put comments in a convenient order and remove the really bad ones from sight, not to provide opinion poll information.
That’s exactly the point: voting is supposed to put comments in order according to quality, so that you can read the worthwhile comments in a reasonable time. My claim is that the current voting system will not do this well at all and that a dual voting system will be better. (That second bit is just a guess). The opinion poll information is just a nice side effect.
OK, so according to you and Benja the point is to have the agree/disagree buttons there mainly as a lightning rod to prevent agreement from affecting quality votes. That’s a good point, but I wonder if it’s worth it and if there are better ways to accomplish the same thing.
I also wonder if there should be a button labeled “malevolent cantaloupe” so the unserious people will click on that instead of voting.