Might be too easily gamed. Imagine that A and B are both keen to get more karma—of course A and B might really be the same person, though not the same LW-user—then they both make 1000-to-1 bets against one another, etc. (Of course the karma system can already be subverted a little by simpler means—A and B just upvote one another—but that’s much slower and milder.)
[EDIT, later: This comment is simply wrong; I wasn’t thinking straight. Sorry.]
You can’t do that for uneven bets, like orthonormal’s. (I suppose you could have a negative-sum system where you say “I’m willing to gain 1 point at the risk of N”, and then you need to find N people who will all bet with you on those terms; they all make 1-for-1 bets, but if you win you only get 1. But that doesn’t seem terribly appealing.)
If Eliezer imagined Brennan as wanting to create more Bayesian masters, ortho would lose 10 points, which MrShaggy would gain. Under the reverse case, ortho gains a point, MrShaggy loses one.
I voted this down and the parent up because, while it’s a fine apology, you should not actually get more karma for admitting a mistake than the person who corrected you gets.
I voted this down, and the immediate parent up, because recognizing one’s errors and acknowledging them is worthy of Karma, even if the error was pointed out to you by another.
I voted this down, and the immediate parent up, because I hope that someone will find my comment ridiculous and vote it down and its parent up and say so, causing someone else to disagree with that response, voting the response down and this comment up.
I voted Eliezer up because I think his observation was perfectly reasonable and didn’t deserve downvoting, and because his action seems eminently reasonable (I’m always glad of extra karma, but I can hardly claim to be entitled to +5 rather than +4 for being an idiot and then admitting it).
I voted Guy’s comment down, then up, then down again, then back to neither-up-nor-down. I hope that’s sufficiently ridiculous to match his comment.
I voted this down and the immediate parent up because I think this conversation was funny and I want the chain to be as long as possible for maximum funniness. And I’m willing to pay a karma point to do it.
And then I changed my downvote of gjm to an upvote, because his comment was actually good.
Bertha Jorkins voted this up and its immediate parent down, and she now has an IQ of 180 and an army of artificially intelligent robot slaves. Charlie Gordon voted this up and its immediate parent down, and gained 120 IQ points, but he lost them all again because he broke the chain.
I rolled a 1d3 dice using the lambdabot in #haskell to determine what I would do, assigning 1 to vote parent and its parent up, 2 to do nothing, and 3 to downvote parent and its parent. I got a 2.
I rolled 1d12 with an actual d12 (Hey, you kids! Get offa my lawn!). 1-4 to upvote gwern, 5-8 to do nothing, and 9-12 to downvote. I got a 10. Then I upvoted all the comments between gwern and Eliezer, inclusive, as a celebration of starting this thread up again. (I also found another comment of gjm’s and voted it up, because the Bertha Jorkins and Charlie Gordon references are brilliant.
Hopefully a*|I voted this down and immediate parent down>*|other-stuff-1> + b*|I voted this up and immediate parent down>*|other-stuff-2> + c*|I voted this down and immediate parent up>*|other-stuff-3> + d*|I voted this up and immediate parent up>*|other-stuff-4> + e*|other possible outcomes>
with a, b, c, d having hopefully approximately the same modulus and e having small modulus, by requesting from hotbits (which claims to use a quantum source of uncertainty) one byte, taking the two lowest order bits, with the 1 bit being for the immediate comment I’m replying to and the 2 bit being for its immediate parent, going by the rule of 0 = downvote and 1 = upvote. (Well, okay, really a mixed state given how it’ll all work, but there will be in the mixed state a sum of states of the form described above, so...)
Requesting byte… now:
And this blob of quantum amplitude is a blob that received FC. So let’s see, that means… both low order bits zero. So downvotes for both Normal_anomaly and gwern. Awww. Well, at least there’ll hopefully be other branches of equal weight in which you both got upvotes from this procedure.
(Hotbits apparently stores up random bits and generally serves requests by peeling off the stack of stored random bits the number of bytes requested. So if the pre stored stuff entangled itself with the rest of the world sufficiently that my decision to do this ended up nontrivially entangled with the particular byte I got, then no promises about other branches. But again, probably end up with basically just a whole lot of states similar to the desired one except that the “other stuff” parts are a tad different.)
Blame me, because I restarted the chain. I voted this down, because it was not very amusing, and the parent up, because I assume it was an HPMOR reference and that is awesome.
I just want to say that I find this chain ridiculously funny beyond all expected measure. None of it (past a point) has any reason to exist, but it still went on quite a while. Good job everyone on writing something so amazingly ridiculous :-)
I’m voting up some pseudo-random selection of comments in this chain, because...well because I found that there was a bottom, and it seemed natural to extend it one further.
I voted up on every comment in this chain on which someone stated that they voted it up, and down on every comment on this chain on which someone stated that they voted it down, removing votes when they cancelled out and using strong-votes instead when they added together. I regret to say that the comment by Dorikka seems to have had three more people say that they voted it up than that they voted it down, so although I gave it a strong upvote, I have only been able to replicate two-thirds of the original vote. I upvoted Dorikka’s last comment on another post to bring the universe back into balance.
Fine with me. (I’m going to take the self-flattering route and assume that my comment got voted up because being prepared to admit one’s errors is a good thing, rather than because the observation “gjm is an idiot” is particularly worthy of upvotes...)
I guess this raises a different question: I’ve been attempting to use my up and down votes as a straight expression of how I regard the post or comment. While I can’t guarantee that I am never drawn to inadvertently engage in corrective voting (where I attempt to bring a post or comment’s karma in line with where I think it should be in an absolute sense or relative to another post), it seems as though this is your conscious approach.
What are the advantages/disadvantages or the two approaches?
The correct voting system looks like this: everyone assigns to each post the score they think it should have. The voting system adds a number of “fake votes” at each threshhold to ensure that posts with few votes don’t get too high a rating, and then takes the median vote as the score. That way there’s no need for “corrective voting”—voting for the score you want to see will always do the right thing.
That puts people with a great deal of Karma in a much better position with respect to Karma gambling. You could take us normal folk all-in pretty easily.
I can think of a desire that Brennan might have, and indeed had it in mind at the time; but since it doesn’t appear in the story, it would seem that my particular belief is not particularly privileged...
...but I agree with you that Brennan’s desire is almost certainly not “a better way to train Bayesian masters”, that would be way the hell out of his revealed character.
Also note: “Power, he’d sought at first. Strength to prevent a repetition of the past. “If you don’t know what you need, take power”—so went the proverb. He had gone first to the Competitive Conspiracy, then to the beisutsukai.”
But the teacher has promised failure as a seemingly necessary step to mastery on this path, so it has not fulfilled what he went there for yet.
Brennan asked: “Is this the only way in which Bayesian masters come to be, sensei?”
And thought: “How could Jeffreyssai possibly have known before Brennan knew himself?”
He wants to find a better way to train Bayesian masters.
I’d wager 10 karma points against 1 that this is not the desire Eliezer has imagined for Brennan.
I’d only wager 5 against 1 that he has a specific desire imagined for Brennan.
(Thus begins the prediction market for the Bardic Conspiracy...)
low priority, I’m sure, but I’d be entirely in favor of a means by which we could enact bets like these.
Might be too easily gamed. Imagine that A and B are both keen to get more karma—of course A and B might really be the same person, though not the same LW-user—then they both make 1000-to-1 bets against one another, etc. (Of course the karma system can already be subverted a little by simpler means—A and B just upvote one another—but that’s much slower and milder.)
I was assuming that karma was actually being transferred, zero-sum.
[EDIT, later: This comment is simply wrong; I wasn’t thinking straight. Sorry.]
You can’t do that for uneven bets, like orthonormal’s. (I suppose you could have a negative-sum system where you say “I’m willing to gain 1 point at the risk of N”, and then you need to find N people who will all bet with you on those terms; they all make 1-for-1 bets, but if you win you only get 1. But that doesn’t seem terribly appealing.)
I don’t understand the problem.
If Eliezer imagined Brennan as wanting to create more Bayesian masters, ortho would lose 10 points, which MrShaggy would gain. Under the reverse case, ortho gains a point, MrShaggy loses one.
The problem is that I’m an idiot and misunderstood; sorry.
I voted this down and the parent up because, while it’s a fine apology, you should not actually get more karma for admitting a mistake than the person who corrected you gets.
I voted this down, and the immediate parent up, because recognizing one’s errors and acknowledging them is worthy of Karma, even if the error was pointed out to you by another.
I voted this down, and the immediate parent up, because I hope that someone will find my comment ridiculous and vote it down and its parent up and say so, causing someone else to disagree with that response, voting the response down and this comment up.
I voted Eliezer up because I think his observation was perfectly reasonable and didn’t deserve downvoting, and because his action seems eminently reasonable (I’m always glad of extra karma, but I can hardly claim to be entitled to +5 rather than +4 for being an idiot and then admitting it).
I voted Guy’s comment down, then up, then down again, then back to neither-up-nor-down. I hope that’s sufficiently ridiculous to match his comment.
I voted this down and the immediate parent up because I think this conversation was funny and I want the chain to be as long as possible for maximum funniness. And I’m willing to pay a karma point to do it.
And then I changed my downvote of gjm to an upvote, because his comment was actually good.
I voted this up, and the immediate parent down, and I DON’T NEED A REASON.
I voted this up because I wouldn’t have found this page if it hadn’t been posted.
I voted this up, and the immediate parent down.
Bertha Jorkins voted this up and its immediate parent down, and she now has an IQ of 180 and an army of artificially intelligent robot slaves. Charlie Gordon voted this up and its immediate parent down, and gained 120 IQ points, but he lost them all again because he broke the chain.
DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN!
I voted this down, and the immediate parent up.
And then I became enlightened.
I rolled a 1d3 dice using the lambdabot in #haskell to determine what I would do, assigning 1 to vote parent and its parent up, 2 to do nothing, and 3 to downvote parent and its parent. I got a 2.
I rolled 1d12 with an actual d12 (Hey, you kids! Get offa my lawn!). 1-4 to upvote gwern, 5-8 to do nothing, and 9-12 to downvote. I got a 10. Then I upvoted all the comments between gwern and Eliezer, inclusive, as a celebration of starting this thread up again. (I also found another comment of gjm’s and voted it up, because the Bertha Jorkins and Charlie Gordon references are brilliant.
Hopefully a*|I voted this down and immediate parent down>*|other-stuff-1> + b*|I voted this up and immediate parent down>*|other-stuff-2> + c*|I voted this down and immediate parent up>*|other-stuff-3> + d*|I voted this up and immediate parent up>*|other-stuff-4> + e*|other possible outcomes>
with a, b, c, d having hopefully approximately the same modulus and e having small modulus, by requesting from hotbits (which claims to use a quantum source of uncertainty) one byte, taking the two lowest order bits, with the 1 bit being for the immediate comment I’m replying to and the 2 bit being for its immediate parent, going by the rule of 0 = downvote and 1 = upvote. (Well, okay, really a mixed state given how it’ll all work, but there will be in the mixed state a sum of states of the form described above, so...)
Requesting byte… now:
And this blob of quantum amplitude is a blob that received FC. So let’s see, that means… both low order bits zero. So downvotes for both Normal_anomaly and gwern. Awww. Well, at least there’ll hopefully be other branches of equal weight in which you both got upvotes from this procedure.
(Hotbits apparently stores up random bits and generally serves requests by peeling off the stack of stored random bits the number of bytes requested. So if the pre stored stuff entangled itself with the rest of the world sufficiently that my decision to do this ended up nontrivially entangled with the particular byte I got, then no promises about other branches. But again, probably end up with basically just a whole lot of states similar to the desired one except that the “other stuff” parts are a tad different.)
I voted on this and the immediate parent, but I won’t reveal why, or which direction, or how many times, or which account I used.
Don’t blame me, I voted for the original comment.
Blame me, because I restarted the chain. I voted this down, because it was not very amusing, and the parent up, because I assume it was an HPMOR reference and that is awesome.
Voted up all comments in this chain except this one, because I can’t vote on my own comments anymore.
I just want to say that I find this chain ridiculously funny beyond all expected measure. None of it (past a point) has any reason to exist, but it still went on quite a while. Good job everyone on writing something so amazingly ridiculous :-)
Voted down all comments in this chain except this one, because I am flesh.
Voted up this comment, for reasons that should be self-evident.
Voted up this comment, for kabbalistic reasons.
Voted down this comment, because 2 other people voted it up and didn’t even have the guts to admit to it.
I’m voting up some pseudo-random selection of comments in this chain, because...well because I found that there was a bottom, and it seemed natural to extend it one further.
I voted up on every comment in this chain on which someone stated that they voted it up, and down on every comment on this chain on which someone stated that they voted it down, removing votes when they cancelled out and using strong-votes instead when they added together. I regret to say that the comment by Dorikka seems to have had three more people say that they voted it up than that they voted it down, so although I gave it a strong upvote, I have only been able to replicate two-thirds of the original vote. I upvoted Dorikka’s last comment on another post to bring the universe back into balance.
I may or may not have voted on your comment, but then I deleted this comment.
Fine with me. (I’m going to take the self-flattering route and assume that my comment got voted up because being prepared to admit one’s errors is a good thing, rather than because the observation “gjm is an idiot” is particularly worthy of upvotes...)
I guess this raises a different question: I’ve been attempting to use my up and down votes as a straight expression of how I regard the post or comment. While I can’t guarantee that I am never drawn to inadvertently engage in corrective voting (where I attempt to bring a post or comment’s karma in line with where I think it should be in an absolute sense or relative to another post), it seems as though this is your conscious approach.
What are the advantages/disadvantages or the two approaches?
The correct voting system looks like this: everyone assigns to each post the score they think it should have. The voting system adds a number of “fake votes” at each threshhold to ensure that posts with few votes don’t get too high a rating, and then takes the median vote as the score. That way there’s no need for “corrective voting”—voting for the score you want to see will always do the right thing.
That puts people with a great deal of Karma in a much better position with respect to Karma gambling. You could take us normal folk all-in pretty easily.
well, I certainly wouldn’t expect anyone to take a bet which could lose them their posting ability, for example.
You win, naturally.
I can think of a desire that Brennan might have, and indeed had it in mind at the time; but since it doesn’t appear in the story, it would seem that my particular belief is not particularly privileged...
...but I agree with you that Brennan’s desire is almost certainly not “a better way to train Bayesian masters”, that would be way the hell out of his revealed character.
Also note: “Power, he’d sought at first. Strength to prevent a repetition of the past. “If you don’t know what you need, take power”—so went the proverb. He had gone first to the Competitive Conspiracy, then to the beisutsukai.”
But the teacher has promised failure as a seemingly necessary step to mastery on this path, so it has not fulfilled what he went there for yet.