That is the price of such an intense desire to signal one’s apathy toward karma! :P My loss, I suppose!
P.S. Luminosity + Radiance rules!
oliverbeatson
Karma: 211
Lower confidence was to account for the fact that some people would read it and decline from voting either way; therefore P>50% of upvote would not imply P<50% of downvote. In hindsight it’s a confusing scheme to parse into bets. Everyone who read (e.g.) the first prediction and didn’t vote would count in the 80% who didn’t downvote it for being self-conscious. The first five percentages were, in my mind, predictions concerning the distribution of the actions of those who read the comment, where ‘didn’t vote’ also counts toward the union. But regarding betting, there’s no way to get the data of how many actually read it.
Huzzah!
Yes, I do agree that getting karma for pleasing but unproductive comments lessens the utility of karma; should be more of a costly signal for a individual’s utility to the community, where the criterion of upvote-selection is important (i.e. ‘propagates rationality’ is presumably most desirable). Upvotes for cheap jokes dampens the signal.
I care about antagonising people and wasting their time, so naturally I pay attention to karma as it’s a reliable signal ;) But of itself it’s pretty useless; given the chance, I wouldn’t choose to press a button that bestowed 1000 magical karma points on my account.
Any sufficiently advanced karma-whoring is indistinguishable from a useful comment. I personally don’t care for karma, but I maintain that I regret the post for wasting people’s time.
I don’t believe there are any real karma-whores on Less Wrong. I’m detailing my beliefs here in an attempt to accurately signal my ability to think about things; I presume it follows that anyone who can think for more than four seconds shouldn’t actually continue to gain pleasure from getting karma for stupid comments. I attempt to signal this because I would not myself wish to learn of the existence of karma-whores on Less Wrong and assume you are the same.
Note the (tenuous) irony; I predicted such criticisms of the post as I wrote it! I hoped people would enjoy reading it; not make conclusions about karma-whoring, which would be bad because I do not gain anything by learning that I have made the readers of Less Wrong unhappy. I do further wonder how many up- or down-votes the first N predictions unaccompanied would have garnered, but I won’t tempt fate by doing trials.
I ended up posting it out of sincere curiosity regarding whether it would go up or down. But I suppose it did amount to spam; I accept my downvotes with no unhappiness.
This comment will be downvoted for being self-conscious: 20%.
This comment will be upvoted for the sake of irony: 35%.
This comment will be downvoted for attempting to get upvotes: 30%.
This comment will be upvoted for being explicit about that fact: 15%.
This comment will be downvoted for being explicit about being explicit about that fact: 15%.
I will regret posting this comment: 65%.
I chose and my world was shaken, so what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not.
Sunday in the Park with George, by Stephen Sondheim
This happened to me just last week.
In response to the downvote: Hmm, I wonder what fraction of people on railway tracks are there because they are reckless and what fraction are victims who are not generally at fault? I assumed my ‘ceteris paribus’ covered this sufficiently but perhaps villainous train-plots are more the norm than I thought. Given this, subsidising the risk of recklessly hanging around train tracks by having a policy of sacrificing innocent bystanders to stop trains will only prevent the emergence of a mechanism whereby people don’t end up on train tracks, which is fairly surely, on net, suboptimal to the cause of not having people die in train accidents. Alternatively, I may have missed the point. This appeals to me as a possibility.
Ceteris paribus, I cannot imagine what number of people stupid enough to be sitting about on a train track (probably violating property rights for a start) it takes before saving them becomes worth the sacrifice of the average bystander.
Bring me back cake.
The test’s questions may need to be considerably dynamic to avert the possibility that people condition to specific problems without shedding the entire infected heuristic. Someone who had read Less Wrong a few times, but didn’t make the knowledge truly a part of them, might return false negative for certain biases while retaining those biases in real-life situations. Don’t want to make the test about guessing the teacher’s password.
Alternative title: How not to be a protagonist in Atlas Shrugged.
To clarify, I liked the post.
Hi. I don’t often comment because generally I doubt I can really contribute much. I’m lurking, but taking notes, I’ve still got a lot to learn but I plan to learn it: on top of this, I need a job, so I’m also attempting to tackle that at the minute, at an admittedly inefficient pace. The most karma I ever got was for a ‘Selfish-Jeans’ joke. Which admittedly was brilliant. But yeah. Hi.
Did it involve facial hair? Often does.
Another Eastbourne, East Sussex.
Hello! I’m Oliver, as my username should make evident. I’m 17 years old, and this site was recommended to me by a friend, whose LW username I observe is ‘Larks’. I drift over to Overcoming Bias occasionally, and have RSS feeds to Richard Dawkins’ site and (the regrettably sensationalist) NewScientist magazine. As far as I can see past my biases, I aspire to advance my understanding of the kinds of things I’ve seen discussed here, science, mathematics, rationality and a large chunk of stuff that at the moment rather confuses me.
I started education with a prominent interest in mathematics, which later expanded to include the sciences and writing, and consider myself at least somewhat lucky to have escaped ten years of light indoctrination from church-school education, later finding warm comfort in the intellectual bosom of Richard Dawkins. I’ve also become familiar with the likes of Alan Turing, Steven Pinker and yet others, from fields of philosophy, mathematics, computing and science.
I’m currently at college in the UK studying my second year of Mathematics, Philosophy, English Language and entering a first year of Physics (I have concluded a year of Computing). As much as I enjoy and value philosophy as a mechanism for genuine rational learning and discovery, I often despise the canon for its almost religious lack of progression and for affixing value to ultimately meaningless questions. It is for this reason that I value having access to Less Wrong et alia. Mathematics is a subject which I learned (the hard way) that I cannot live without.
I think I’ve said as much here as I can and as much as I need to, so I’ll conclude with a toast: to a future of enlightenment, learning, overcoming biases and most importantly fun.
I’d be weary of going dressed in selfish jeans.
I think the problem with bookmarks is that you are able to create endless lists of them, and it becomes undesirable to revisit or keep up with them all. However the idea of a home page condenses the amount of links to keep up with to a manageable amount, and is also suitable for an individual user.
I wonder how much this would work for a homosexual male.
I’ve actually been trying this essential thing, although with less persistence as it requires a certain amount of effort to attend to something that just seems so immediately boring to myself. Perhaps living in a hetero-normative culture ensures that when a man decides that he’s gay, he is more likely to have discovered a roughly immutable biological fact?