It seems to me like you extended the voting period and spent more effort to get people to vote by sending out emails because you believe the voting is important.
When it comes to this post it doesn’t make a case of why you believe it’s valuable to vote here. I’m curious about what your idea happens to be.
When it comes to the interface I think it would be great if the interface would show me my past karma votes on the post. It’s useful to have the information of how I found the post after reading it the first time at hand when trying to evaluate 75 posts at once.
I realize we didn’t justify the Voting very hard. Here’s my offhand attempt, which maybe we’ll roll into the actual post after chatting about it more on Monday.
LessWrong runs, for good or for ill, off the same forces much of the rest of the internet runs on: people who are slightly bored at work. Naturally, posts get rewarded mostly by upvotes and comments, which disproportionately reward things for being exciting and for controversial (respectively). These are quite easy to goodhart on.
The Review (in general), and Voting (in particular) are an attempt to do a more nuanced thing – to take the accumulated taste of the LessWrong community, and use it to reflect hard on what was actually good, and then backpropagate that signal through people’s more general sense of “what sort of posts are good to write and why?”
Without the Vote, the signal would basically be entirely “what the Mod Team Thinks Was Best”, or, if we weren’t doing this at all “what posts were memorable, and/or high karma”. And this isn’t ideal for a few reasons:
The Mod Team doesn’t have domain expertise in all the areas that posts explore
Even though we’re putting a lot of work into it, it’s still a really daunting project to form opinions on all 75 posts. Having a mixture of people who’ve looked harder at different posts helps give more coverage of nuanced opinions.
Something something wisdom of crowds – each person is biased in some way, or has different knowledge. Getting many people to participate helps counterbalance various knowledge and biases that individuals have.
I meanwhile expect the voting here to be better than usual karma-voting, because it’s more comparative. You’re not just voting on “this post seems good!” but “this post seems better than this other post”. What I found useful for my own voting was being forced to stop and think and build a model of what-sorts-of-posts-are-good-and-why.
When it comes to the interface I think it would be great if the interface would show me my past karma votes on the post. It’s useful to have the information of how I found the post after reading it the first time at hand when trying to evaluate 75 posts at once.
Yeah, I definitely agree with this. I think we’ve put about as much work into the UI as we’re going to this year (I originally budgeted a couple weeks of time for the Review and ended up spending 1.5 months on it, but I think, assuming it stays in roughly the same form next year, this is an obvious thing to include)
It seems to me like you extended the voting period and spent more effort to get people to vote by sending out emails because you believe the voting is important.
When it comes to this post it doesn’t make a case of why you believe it’s valuable to vote here. I’m curious about what your idea happens to be.
When it comes to the interface I think it would be great if the interface would show me my past karma votes on the post. It’s useful to have the information of how I found the post after reading it the first time at hand when trying to evaluate 75 posts at once.
I realize we didn’t justify the Voting very hard. Here’s my offhand attempt, which maybe we’ll roll into the actual post after chatting about it more on Monday.
LessWrong runs, for good or for ill, off the same forces much of the rest of the internet runs on: people who are slightly bored at work. Naturally, posts get rewarded mostly by upvotes and comments, which disproportionately reward things for being exciting and for controversial (respectively). These are quite easy to goodhart on.
The Review (in general), and Voting (in particular) are an attempt to do a more nuanced thing – to take the accumulated taste of the LessWrong community, and use it to reflect hard on what was actually good, and then backpropagate that signal through people’s more general sense of “what sort of posts are good to write and why?”
Without the Vote, the signal would basically be entirely “what the Mod Team Thinks Was Best”, or, if we weren’t doing this at all “what posts were memorable, and/or high karma”. And this isn’t ideal for a few reasons:
The Mod Team doesn’t have domain expertise in all the areas that posts explore
Even though we’re putting a lot of work into it, it’s still a really daunting project to form opinions on all 75 posts. Having a mixture of people who’ve looked harder at different posts helps give more coverage of nuanced opinions.
Something something wisdom of crowds – each person is biased in some way, or has different knowledge. Getting many people to participate helps counterbalance various knowledge and biases that individuals have.
I meanwhile expect the voting here to be better than usual karma-voting, because it’s more comparative. You’re not just voting on “this post seems good!” but “this post seems better than this other post”. What I found useful for my own voting was being forced to stop and think and build a model of what-sorts-of-posts-are-good-and-why.
Yeah, I definitely agree with this. I think we’ve put about as much work into the UI as we’re going to this year (I originally budgeted a couple weeks of time for the Review and ended up spending 1.5 months on it, but I think, assuming it stays in roughly the same form next year, this is an obvious thing to include)