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.
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.