To what degree will opting out of specific exercises/events be accepted or tolerated?
(Mostly asking out of curiosity, but if I were seriously considering going this would be a significant issue; I have a rather firm policy of not considering myself obligated to do things unless I’ve actively agreed to the specific thing, including reserving the right to decline to do things based on the tone or context of the request or demand, as an anti-foot-in-the-door measure, and your description of the nature of the event leads me to be unsure of whether this policy would get me sent home or otherwise cause problems.)
A “boot camp” is quite specifically an immersion experience, with the unfortunately cultic effects AdeleneDawner wishes to avoid. This would require detailed information beforehand, yes. It sounds way cool (and I’d love to be able to go myself), but FINE-GRAINED CONSENT ISSUES ARE REALLY QUITE IMPORTANT to many people.
I’m not even worried about cult issues—I’m fairly confident that I’d notice and extricate myself from such a situation if there was one. (I’ve done so before, more than once.) It’s more of an issue of consistently being a certain kind of person: Rather like Alicorn and Eliezer don’t lie, I don’t base my actions on other peoples’ assumption or pressures regarding what I should or will do. (It may be noteworthy that this isn’t the same as not taking peoples’ likely reactions to my actions into account.)
I tried to make the same point, by way of a joke (I wrote that the seminar on Xenu and thetans was mandatory). Lost karma, deleted the joke before I lost too much karma. If I lose karma on this I’ll delete this comment too.
“Boot camp” may be a rather unfortunate metaphor for SIAI to have used. From Wikipedia: “Recruit training is the initial indoctrination and instruction given to new military personnel … The process of transforming civilians into soldiers, sailors, coast guardsmen, Marines or airmen has been described by military historian Gwynne Dyer as a form of conditioning in which inductees are encouraged to partially submerge their individuality for the good of their unit.”
“______ Boot Camp” seems to be a reasonably common construction, and I’ve always understood it to refer simply to intensive training in some specialized topic, without being especially evocative of the more sinister aspects of its military namesake.
(Though if accepting the full metaphor means we’re taking it as a given that militaries are cults (indeed prototypical of cults), I’ll take it!)
I deliberately condition myself to not be afraid of losing karma. Trying to strike a balance between accepting other peoples opinions and listening to my own judgement is difficult. But when too many people delete anything which is unpopular, a sites content becomes monolithic.
Although since it was an easy to misinterpret joke, my karma policies may be irrelevant. Feel free to downvote.
I’ve decided I would rather have more comments than more karma… And the two do seem to be somewhat inversely related. My first post, on a nice non-controversial topic like reaction speed, has triple the karma of my post on religious communities...but the latter has triple the comments of the former. Maybe people tend to comment more on something they disagree with. I think that ultimately the comments people make are more productive and useful for me to change my mind or see things from a new perspective, whereas karma really just means I can brag to my brother.
This site is based on reddit tech. I joined hacker news, which is related, made my first comment, which lost karma. My karma was at that point slightly below zero. And guess what happened at that point. nobody saw any of my comments from that point forward, because I was below reading threshold, which meant also that my karma was stuck (I think it was −4). I checked, by logging off and looking for my own comments. I fixed the problem by creating a new account, which gained karma steadily.
But what kind of system is one which permanently silences someone who happens to go negative on his first try? Reflection on this soured me toward hacker news and I eventually left, haven’t been back. The obvious fix is to start people off with, say, 50 karma points. Give people a chance, don’t silence them if their first comment displeases somebody. Which I don’t see anybody implementing.
Right now, I have karma below 200. I want to build up karma because I don’t want to have to create a new account.
Frankly, though, I don’t care for karma. I think the main use of karma is to prevent flame wars, because obviously, if you say something really offensive, your karma will drop off a cliff and go negatively quickly. That’s about it. I don’t think it is otherwise terribly useful.
My karma was at that point slightly below zero. And guess what happened at that point. nobody saw any of my comments from that point forward, because I was below reading threshold, which meant also that my karma was stuck (I think it was −4).
I did not know that. That makes no sense! I assumed the karma would start at zero for each comment, and if it went below the threshold, then that comment would disappear, but that any new comments would start at zero and be visible, and might get upvoted based on its merits.
Also, for me karma has a definitive role as a motivator to make intelligent, well-thought out comments and posts.
Also, for me karma has a definitive role as a motivator to make intelligent, well-thought out comments and posts.
Indeed, when a post of mine gets high karma I can’t help but think “wow, I’m brilliant”. However, I’m afraid that the reality of karma doesn’t quite match our ideas about it. Your conscious understanding of the effect of karma on your commenting is that it motivates you to make intelligent, well-thought out comments. But if you’re like a typical human, and I think you are, then you are adapting your writing, largely without conscious awareness, in the direction of whatever maximizes karma, even when that conflicts with maximizing rationality, and, I think, it quite often does. I’ve seen karma turn other sites useless. I think that there must be some way to either improve or replace karma systems, so that their intended function is performed, but without ultimately ruining the forum.
But you know what, I’m not sure that if karma could be improved to better serve its supposed purpose, it would be. Karma, as currently implemented, is status, and people love status, they love pecking orders. So, even though karma-as-status serves our darker selves, it’s probably not going to go away.
A more genuinely useful rating system would probably move in the direction of the Netflix rating system. But that system would not give a person an overall score, and therefore rank, within the community. Rather, it would score a person differently depending on who was looking at the score. The score I saw would not be the score somebody else saw.
And there would be no gradual accumulation of karma over time, which mimics seniority. People love their seniority. It’s a much loved form of status. Instead, in a Netflix-like system, participants would quickly, almost immediately, achieve a karma matching that of long-time participants. Nobody would want that. People want their status, their pecking order, so even though it doesn’t genuinely serve rationality, that’s probably what they’re going to want to stick with.
I think the karma system on LessWrong works surprisingly well, as long as people remember that “Vote up” and “Vote down” means “more like this” and “less like this”, rather than “agree/disagree”. There are standard beliefs and some groupthink, but you can still get upvoted for quite cutting criticisms if you show in your comment that you’ve done your homework and understand what you’re objecting to.
I don’t think there’s anything broken about the current system. Certainly the comments on LessWrong are exceedingly high quality in general, particularly compared to pretty much any other site.
I believe that the quality of the comments could very easily be independent of the existence of the karma system and dependent, instead, on the high quality and low number of participants. It might well be that pretty much any crude moderation system would work about as well. I remember certain Usenet groups which were quite high quality, in particular comp.ai.philosophy (I think it was called), back around 1991 or so. I had some satisfying discussions there, at quite a high level. So, it’s not as though high quality conversation was not to be had in an unmoderated forum, provided the participants were sufficiently few and sufficiently good, which was I think largely achieved in that group. In larger groups there was more noise.
Karma depends on voters, so a low-population forum will not be much affected by karma. Karma really kicks in, really affects what goes on, when the number of participants goes up. And what happened at Digg and Reddit are examples of what I expect to happen anywhere where the forum explodes. Karma becomes a powerful tool of groupthink, firmly establishing an echo chamber.
I suspect this is part of the normal lifecycle of Internet forums. A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky is the standard work on the topic.
Contrariwise, a group norm against status rankings does not stop them happening—it just means they form where you’re not looking and bite you in the backside. The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman is the standard work on this topic.
To summarise the summary: people remain a problem.
And guess what happened at that point. nobody saw any of my comments from that point forward, because I was below reading threshold, which meant also that my karma was stuck (I think it was −4). I checked, by logging off and looking for my own comments. I fixed the problem by creating a new account, which gained karma steadily.
I’m pretty sure the comment-visibility rules are different depending whether you’re logged in or not. The reason for that is because the logged-out view is what search engines see, so it’s especially important to keep bot-produced spam hidden there. Logged-in users have a configurable, per-comment threshold.
I’d think a better idea would be to either make Karma two numbers (like −4:135) where the first is the score and the second is across posts, or to set the level to hide some body at a slight negative level—this way the negative is shown (as an indicator/warning) but the writer is not hidden unless they persist in flaunting the sites norms.
It is intended to automatically filter trolls, but being locked out after one bad comment does seem harsh. I would not worry about managing your karma now though… It would take a significant series of widely detested posts for you to be stuck making a new account.
The first downvote—and only one I saw—was mine, and I gave it because it wasn’t at all clear whether you were trying to belittle my concern or not. Given that you’ve clarified: Here, have your karma point back. :)
Good question. I haven’t quite figured this out yet, but one solution is to present everyone we are seriously considering with as much concrete information about the activities as we can and then give each of them a fixed number of “outs,” each of which can be used to get out of one activity.
What advantages are you getting back in return for committing to an inflexible policy in advance rather than deciding what to do as the situation actually arises?
Intensive training often involves doing things you would not normally make yourself do, but if I go and they ask me to do anything truly insane or unethical, I would opt out whether it was tolerated or not. That said, I trust most people here enough that I am extremely doubtful this will be necessary.
There’s another category besides insane and unethical, both of which I take to mean activities which would be bad for anybody.
What about individual overload? The challenge of developing a program like a boot camp is having some idea of what challenges will be useful rather than damaging, in a context where people are assumed to be too cautious with themselves.
Is there such a thing as too much for the participants? If so, what methods will the people running the boot camp use to recognize it?
To what degree will opting out of specific exercises/events be accepted or tolerated?
(Mostly asking out of curiosity, but if I were seriously considering going this would be a significant issue; I have a rather firm policy of not considering myself obligated to do things unless I’ve actively agreed to the specific thing, including reserving the right to decline to do things based on the tone or context of the request or demand, as an anti-foot-in-the-door measure, and your description of the nature of the event leads me to be unsure of whether this policy would get me sent home or otherwise cause problems.)
A “boot camp” is quite specifically an immersion experience, with the unfortunately cultic effects AdeleneDawner wishes to avoid. This would require detailed information beforehand, yes. It sounds way cool (and I’d love to be able to go myself), but FINE-GRAINED CONSENT ISSUES ARE REALLY QUITE IMPORTANT to many people.
I’m not even worried about cult issues—I’m fairly confident that I’d notice and extricate myself from such a situation if there was one. (I’ve done so before, more than once.) It’s more of an issue of consistently being a certain kind of person: Rather like Alicorn and Eliezer don’t lie, I don’t base my actions on other peoples’ assumption or pressures regarding what I should or will do. (It may be noteworthy that this isn’t the same as not taking peoples’ likely reactions to my actions into account.)
I tried to make the same point, by way of a joke (I wrote that the seminar on Xenu and thetans was mandatory). Lost karma, deleted the joke before I lost too much karma. If I lose karma on this I’ll delete this comment too.
“Boot camp” may be a rather unfortunate metaphor for SIAI to have used. From Wikipedia: “Recruit training is the initial indoctrination and instruction given to new military personnel … The process of transforming civilians into soldiers, sailors, coast guardsmen, Marines or airmen has been described by military historian Gwynne Dyer as a form of conditioning in which inductees are encouraged to partially submerge their individuality for the good of their unit.”
“______ Boot Camp” seems to be a reasonably common construction, and I’ve always understood it to refer simply to intensive training in some specialized topic, without being especially evocative of the more sinister aspects of its military namesake.
(Though if accepting the full metaphor means we’re taking it as a given that militaries are cults (indeed prototypical of cults), I’ll take it!)
I deliberately condition myself to not be afraid of losing karma. Trying to strike a balance between accepting other peoples opinions and listening to my own judgement is difficult. But when too many people delete anything which is unpopular, a sites content becomes monolithic.
Although since it was an easy to misinterpret joke, my karma policies may be irrelevant. Feel free to downvote.
I’ve decided I would rather have more comments than more karma… And the two do seem to be somewhat inversely related. My first post, on a nice non-controversial topic like reaction speed, has triple the karma of my post on religious communities...but the latter has triple the comments of the former. Maybe people tend to comment more on something they disagree with. I think that ultimately the comments people make are more productive and useful for me to change my mind or see things from a new perspective, whereas karma really just means I can brag to my brother.
I suspect that more comments means that more people thought about it harder as well.
This site is based on reddit tech. I joined hacker news, which is related, made my first comment, which lost karma. My karma was at that point slightly below zero. And guess what happened at that point. nobody saw any of my comments from that point forward, because I was below reading threshold, which meant also that my karma was stuck (I think it was −4). I checked, by logging off and looking for my own comments. I fixed the problem by creating a new account, which gained karma steadily.
But what kind of system is one which permanently silences someone who happens to go negative on his first try? Reflection on this soured me toward hacker news and I eventually left, haven’t been back. The obvious fix is to start people off with, say, 50 karma points. Give people a chance, don’t silence them if their first comment displeases somebody. Which I don’t see anybody implementing.
Right now, I have karma below 200. I want to build up karma because I don’t want to have to create a new account.
Frankly, though, I don’t care for karma. I think the main use of karma is to prevent flame wars, because obviously, if you say something really offensive, your karma will drop off a cliff and go negatively quickly. That’s about it. I don’t think it is otherwise terribly useful.
I did not know that. That makes no sense! I assumed the karma would start at zero for each comment, and if it went below the threshold, then that comment would disappear, but that any new comments would start at zero and be visible, and might get upvoted based on its merits.
Also, for me karma has a definitive role as a motivator to make intelligent, well-thought out comments and posts.
Indeed, when a post of mine gets high karma I can’t help but think “wow, I’m brilliant”. However, I’m afraid that the reality of karma doesn’t quite match our ideas about it. Your conscious understanding of the effect of karma on your commenting is that it motivates you to make intelligent, well-thought out comments. But if you’re like a typical human, and I think you are, then you are adapting your writing, largely without conscious awareness, in the direction of whatever maximizes karma, even when that conflicts with maximizing rationality, and, I think, it quite often does. I’ve seen karma turn other sites useless. I think that there must be some way to either improve or replace karma systems, so that their intended function is performed, but without ultimately ruining the forum.
But you know what, I’m not sure that if karma could be improved to better serve its supposed purpose, it would be. Karma, as currently implemented, is status, and people love status, they love pecking orders. So, even though karma-as-status serves our darker selves, it’s probably not going to go away.
A more genuinely useful rating system would probably move in the direction of the Netflix rating system. But that system would not give a person an overall score, and therefore rank, within the community. Rather, it would score a person differently depending on who was looking at the score. The score I saw would not be the score somebody else saw.
And there would be no gradual accumulation of karma over time, which mimics seniority. People love their seniority. It’s a much loved form of status. Instead, in a Netflix-like system, participants would quickly, almost immediately, achieve a karma matching that of long-time participants. Nobody would want that. People want their status, their pecking order, so even though it doesn’t genuinely serve rationality, that’s probably what they’re going to want to stick with.
I think the karma system on LessWrong works surprisingly well, as long as people remember that “Vote up” and “Vote down” means “more like this” and “less like this”, rather than “agree/disagree”. There are standard beliefs and some groupthink, but you can still get upvoted for quite cutting criticisms if you show in your comment that you’ve done your homework and understand what you’re objecting to.
I don’t think there’s anything broken about the current system. Certainly the comments on LessWrong are exceedingly high quality in general, particularly compared to pretty much any other site.
I believe that the quality of the comments could very easily be independent of the existence of the karma system and dependent, instead, on the high quality and low number of participants. It might well be that pretty much any crude moderation system would work about as well. I remember certain Usenet groups which were quite high quality, in particular comp.ai.philosophy (I think it was called), back around 1991 or so. I had some satisfying discussions there, at quite a high level. So, it’s not as though high quality conversation was not to be had in an unmoderated forum, provided the participants were sufficiently few and sufficiently good, which was I think largely achieved in that group. In larger groups there was more noise.
Karma depends on voters, so a low-population forum will not be much affected by karma. Karma really kicks in, really affects what goes on, when the number of participants goes up. And what happened at Digg and Reddit are examples of what I expect to happen anywhere where the forum explodes. Karma becomes a powerful tool of groupthink, firmly establishing an echo chamber.
I suspect this is part of the normal lifecycle of Internet forums. A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky is the standard work on the topic.
Contrariwise, a group norm against status rankings does not stop them happening—it just means they form where you’re not looking and bite you in the backside. The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman is the standard work on this topic.
To summarise the summary: people remain a problem.
I’m pretty sure the comment-visibility rules are different depending whether you’re logged in or not. The reason for that is because the logged-out view is what search engines see, so it’s especially important to keep bot-produced spam hidden there. Logged-in users have a configurable, per-comment threshold.
I’d think a better idea would be to either make Karma two numbers (like −4:135) where the first is the score and the second is across posts, or to set the level to hide some body at a slight negative level—this way the negative is shown (as an indicator/warning) but the writer is not hidden unless they persist in flaunting the sites norms.
It is intended to automatically filter trolls, but being locked out after one bad comment does seem harsh. I would not worry about managing your karma now though… It would take a significant series of widely detested posts for you to be stuck making a new account.
I don’t even think it was a bad comment. It was an off color joke which would have gone over well in some forums. :)
I think you underestimate the difficulty of preventing a rapidly growing forum from degenerating into nothing but off color jokes.
The first downvote—and only one I saw—was mine, and I gave it because it wasn’t at all clear whether you were trying to belittle my concern or not. Given that you’ve clarified: Here, have your karma point back. :)
Good question. I haven’t quite figured this out yet, but one solution is to present everyone we are seriously considering with as much concrete information about the activities as we can and then give each of them a fixed number of “outs,” each of which can be used to get out of one activity.
What advantages are you getting back in return for committing to an inflexible policy in advance rather than deciding what to do as the situation actually arises?
Intensive training often involves doing things you would not normally make yourself do, but if I go and they ask me to do anything truly insane or unethical, I would opt out whether it was tolerated or not. That said, I trust most people here enough that I am extremely doubtful this will be necessary.
There’s another category besides insane and unethical, both of which I take to mean activities which would be bad for anybody.
What about individual overload? The challenge of developing a program like a boot camp is having some idea of what challenges will be useful rather than damaging, in a context where people are assumed to be too cautious with themselves.
Is there such a thing as too much for the participants? If so, what methods will the people running the boot camp use to recognize it?
Participation in the seminar on Xenu and the thetans will be mandatory. :)