I’m a freak about tools and symmetries. I suffer from chronic achronic dysfunction. Usually displaced a few years into the future? What is now or then? Probably on the spectrum, too, but why know where? I’d actually prefer to discover I am less right because that’s where the biggest learning opportunities are, but at the same time deep learning becomes more difficult with age. Latest recent self modifications? Homo sapiens’ mobile larynx and DNA as recipe book, not blueprint.
shanen
Karma: −9
First question is about the “Verification code” that was just sent to my already validated (6 years ago) email address. It might even be urgent? Is there some penalty if I ignore the code now that I’m apparently already logged in? (No mention of “verification” in the FAQ. I know that I did not manually enter the verification code anywhere, but the website somehow decided I was logged in anyway.)
I visited this website at least one time (6 years ago) and left a message. Then I forgot about LW until the book The AI Does Not Hate You reminded me.
My next question is about a better website, but perhaps the premises of my question are false. If so, then I hope someone will enlighten me. I think I know what I am looking for, and this does not seem to be it (even though I do like “the feel” of the website. I think this website has a one-dimensional rating system for karma (along the lines of Slashdot?), but I think reality is more complicated and I am looking for a thoughtful discussion website with a deeper representation of reality and more dimensions.
I could describe what I am seeking in much more detail, but for my first comment in a long time, and basically a practice post, I think I should just Submit now (and look around some more). This welcome-to-lesswrong seems to be a “Hello, World” starting place. So “Hello, world”. See ya around?
My mistake. This is the “Hello, world” place. But the default sort of this one should probably not be by “top scoring”? However, like the visible top scored comment, I, too, have been away from LW for some years. (Nice to see that I can change the sort order without losing my draft. Evidence of solid code. However the newly visible top comment is from 5 months ago? Months between comments?)
I was reminded of LW by The AI Does Not Hate You, though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other references to it over the years. So far my impressions are mostly favorable, except that it seems to use 1D karma and I’m averse to reducing people (or even my opinions about people) to any single dimension.
I am somewhat interested in the mentioned books related to LW, but I have trouble finishing ebooks. Perhaps the first thing I should seek is advice on how to enjoy ebooks? I still enjoy many dead trees every year. (And I confirmed that none of my local libraries has any of them. I pretty regularly use a half dozen library systems.)
Pretty sure this comment is going to go badly. Please excuse me for my incoherence, amplified by my limited time. But I have a number of strong reactions. The three strongest are:
(1) I do not want to reduce humans to or be reduced to a single metric. Symmetry violation (of the Golden Rule).
(2) Arbitrary scaling should be avoided by normalization. Most obvious example is weighting down votes by 4. From a symmetry perspective, the weighting should reflect which way the votes are cast and who is casting the votes. (I also think negative votes should be justified, but that’s a new aspect.)
(3) Insufficiently detailed accounting for the costs of the project. However I am quite favorably impressed that success criteria were at least considered. (Is cost recovery a symmetry? (But in actionable terms, I don’t know if I would have pledged money to implement this project. I’m having trouble seeing it as a step in any positive direction.))
Now for the worst part. I have a delusion of a better solution approach. As a joke, “I know it when I see it” and this isn’t it and doesn’t even seem to be a step in a “right and proper” direction. I think a simple up-down vote is okay, but should mostly be limited to defining a weight that is applied to a multidimensional vector. I’ve described it as MEPR elsewhere, but here I’m going to retag it as DK for Deeper Karma.
Defining the direction of that DK vector should involve an optional deeper reaction. Rather than +/- it would involve looking at some dimensions and voting them up or down. As much as possible, the dimensions should be orthogonal and symmetric. (In the OP, this use of “dimension” is close to “metric” selection.)
A few examples of dimensions: Simple dimension of humor, with + for funny and—for unfunny. The age of the identity is a one-way metric, but it can be normalized on a scale from youngest to oldest. Really messy dimension but a dimension for fox versus hedgehog would be interesting. (Considering how IBM and the google analyze identities, there are hundreds of such dimensions, but we human beings have limited attention spans and at any one time the number of dimensions should be limited, perhaps to 5 or 7.)
Now for an elevator ride past the trickiest symmetry. It is necessary to begin by dividing DK in twain. Let’s call them DK-A for Artifact and DK-I for Identity (that created the artifact). Now “You will know them by their fruits.” Reacting to an artifact will change it’s DK-A, and the identity whose comments earned those reactions will have those reactions reflected in the DK-I.
In addition, in the process of giving reactions, the identity’s DK-I should be considered. The humor dimension is a simple example. If someone has earned many positive humor reactions, then it should count more when that identity reacts to another artifact by assessing it as +/- humor. In contrast, an identity with negative humor should not be able to affect humor scores much.
Now for the messy bit that seems to confuse people. How can the DK be displayed? I imagine the DK-I should be paired with its identity. I would actually favor a little radar diagram with selected dimensions. Clicking on the identity’s own link would take you to whatever the identity wants to say about itself, but clicking on the DK-I icon will take you to the details about all of the data that contributes to the DK-I. (Symmetry time again. The comment (as a public artifact) would have a DK-A link for its data and history.)
Why do this? Now we’re getting into the cans of worms by the six-packs of cans. But I can reduce it to two major cans:
(1) My time is limited and there is always much more content than I could read. (Ditto videos or podcasts or pictures or whatever.) DK could help me filter.
(2) I want to become a better person and looking at my own DK-I would be useful feedback in improving. Am I being too much of a prick? For example, I don’t want to be rude, but I think too many of my reactions are negative in ways that seem negative on the polite dimension, and my own DK-I would let me get an honest assessment of how rude (or polite) other people think I am.
Already spent much more time than I had intended, but mostly I have to apologize for having taken up so much of your time. I think this description is quite shallow and confusing. If you have been able to follow it then you deserve some kudos and DK-I positive for reading skills’ dimensions. Also you are being quite polite to a stranger, and your DK-I should go up for that reason. (Not only are I one, but I’m currently reading L’Étranger with Japanese annotations.)
Oh yeah. One more thing. It would be interesting if the the website itself could pick out DK-A dimensions of interest and relevance. That would simply the rating process if you opted to look at the deeper karma instead of the simple +/- reaction.
This is just a test reply mostly to see what replies look like. The time-critical question about the Verification code may already be moot?
Thank you for your reply. I’m pretty sure you meant “thought” rather than something like “been through this [before]”. [And later I got detoured into the Chat help and had some trouble recovering to this draft...]
As regards your closing, I believe the trite reply is “No fair! I asked you first.” ;-) [I recently read The Semiotics of Emoji and would insert a humorous one if it were available.[But in chat it appeared to convert the one I just used. Here?]]
I am considering submitting a new question, either for this question or for your other reply (which might relate to a long comment I wrote on karma (but I can’t see the full context from here) or about LW’s financial model (in the context of how it influences discussions on LW).
With regards to this question, I can already say that LW seems to be solidly implemented and matches the features of any discussion website that I know of. Not the same, but at the high end of matches. I also confirmed the Unicode support. [A test here: 僕の二つの言語は日本語ですよ。]
But I have already consumed my morning writing time, so I’ll wrap for now and hopefully will be able to figure out the context of your other reply later today. Time allowing (as always).
Is an ACK called for?
I would add one more aspect if I didn’t suspect it’s a moot topic. The financial side. Someone has to cover the costs of things… I personally favor cost-recovery from wannabe donors and actual beneficiaries. However I think LessWrong may use the big donor model, which only works as long as the donor’s pockets stay full and the donor doesn’t make too many bad calls.
[Question] Is the influence of money pervasive, even on LessWrong?
Not even sure this comment is directed at me, but quite sure my reply is quite late. (In terms of deciding to reply, it would be helpful if LW revealed something about your recent activity in the flyover.)
At this point I don’t recall the books in sufficient detail to address your question properly. I do fit them into the general scheme of compulsive behavior. My general take on habitual behaviors (including compulsions) is that certain parts of the lower brain are the mechanical keys to the compulsions, but there’s a scale before things get into extremes like OCD. The complicated part is that there are many paths into the lower brain. On that foundation, my basic theory is that some people are more subject to compulsive behaviors (which can be roughly mapped to having less willpower), but the trigger for a compulsive behavior is a point of attack to change that behavior. Some triggers are definitely worse than others, so switching to a less troublesome trigger is an improvement.
Supplemental reading? I am a Strange Loop by Hofstadter is relevant, though my interpretation is different from his. I think all of us run various mental programs, and his recursive loops are only a relatively minor subset. (But I think his Godel, Escher, Bach is still a must read, especially the chapter on translation.) Quite recently I read Descartes’ Error by Damasio, which is relevant. He’s approaching these problems from a more mechanical level, but with heavy consideration of how emotions are involved in decision making. Also the books from Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely are excellent.
I think it would be good if the article mentioned data sources, but perhaps I’m projecting since I have a lot of experience with them. Right now I’m using three devices to assess my sleep. One is motion based and the quality of the data is limited. The other two are wristbands that combine pulse with arm motion to automatically detect and record sleep. Both of them divide sleep into deep, shallow, and REM, but they disagree quite a bit on the actual details when they measure my sleep. (And I wear both of them on the same wrist, too.) If there is interest I can provide more details (including some impressions from older activity monitors).
As I thought about my own data going back some years, I was reminded that age is an important factor, but it doesn’t appear to be mentioned in the article. I actually think I may be sleeping pretty well after adjusting for that factor.
I can easily apologize for my tangents. I do tend to wander. However I can also easily blame my zen collapse from some years back. It used to be a 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon world, but now things too often seem to me to be only one or even zero degrees separated. It’s the same thing when you look at it that way?
Not easy to figure out how to fix my question. And if I figured out how to improve it, then I’m not even sure I should fix it or just stay here in the comments, though I see it is possible to edit the original question.
So… Another way to word the question along your lines could be “How are the (visible) conversational flows affected by the (less visible) money flows?” (If I do modify the original, does it preserve old versions to clarify replies that will then seem out of context?)
Take the google as an example for the main topic? The google started with one set of goals and even had the motto of “Don’t be evil.” Then the money started flowing and the business mutated. I actually think the google’s de-facto motto these days is “All your attentions is belong to us [so we can sell your eyeballs to the paying advertisers].” But there is a fundamental inconsistency there. Advertisers do not want to pay for the most critical thinkers reasoning based on the best data. Advertisers want obedient consumers who will obey the ads, whether they are selling deodorant or stinky politicians. (In another (still simplified) perspective on that subtopic of advertising (bridging to money), the costs are extremely high for the final increments of quality to produce the best products that can then be advertised as being the best. In contrast, the costs are much lower for advertising that portrays legally adequate products as the best.)
Thank you for your reply. I looked at your link, but I am not clear about the relation of “politics” to my question as currently constrained. (Right now I see no reason to extend it in that direction unless the financial model is related to politics. I have so far seen no evidence to that effect. Maybe you could clarify how you see the relationship?)
I was trying to avoid expressing my opinions or suggestions, though if I didn’t see the world (or some aspect of the world) as potentially different, maybe even better, then I would deny that there is any problem to be considered. A problem without a solution is not really a problem, but just part of the way things are and we have to live with it. To pretend that I have no opinion or perspective would be quite misleading.
Or I could remap it to the word “question” itself? If no answer exists, then where (or why) was the question?
Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by “question” in the context of a question that is suitable input for the “New Question” prompt? Would that be a better way to approach it?
Looking (yet again) at the “Default comment guidelines”, the explanation for my phrasing of the question was because my initial reading of LW seemed to indicate that money is not supposed to influence the discussions and I am skeptical of that. I am asking for clarification, but that may be a request to be persuaded LW has a viable financial model? My previous reply included a more concrete example. As a prediction? Hmm… I guess there must be some topics which are not suitable for discussion on LW and therefore I could predict that some of them may be unsuitable for reasons related to the financial models? I still don’t see anything that I disagree with and I am already curious about what y’all are thinking (but that is part of my general theory of communication as a two-way process).
Say oops? Not yet, but it happens all the time. I hope I change my mind frequently as I learn new things, but I also try to minimize logical contradictions. I am usually trying to extend my mental frameworks so that apparent contradictions can be resolved or diverted. (I’ve gotten old enough that I think most of my positions have substantial data underlying them.)
Interesting reply, and again I thank you for your thoughts. Still not seeing how “politics” figures in. I’m not trying to provoke any emotional reactions. (Nor do I perceive myself as having any strong emotional reactions to anything I’ve seen on LW so far.)
The part about your BBS especially hits a nerve. I created and operated a BBS in my youth. I did include a financial model in the design of my BBS, but my primary motivation at the time was to create a real cost for abuse of the BBS and secondarily to recover some of the costs. (Dedicated hardware and an extra phone line (I think).) I did not include my programming time as a cost because I mostly regarded that as a learning experience that was also improving my own market value as a programmer. Looking back, I actually think the deficiencies in my financial model greatly limited the success of the system, and if I had done it again, then I would have changed the priorities so that the funding model of the BBS put priority on the main objectives of the users. I even see how I could have arranged the model to align my personal philosophy more closely to the users’ objectives. (But I don’t have a time machine to go back and fix it now and I got busy with other stuff for many years after that...)
I also sympathize (?) or partially concur with the idea of keeping things small and self-contained. However I also see that as part of the financial model. I think the Diaspora fiasco on Kickstarter is a good example of how such things can go wrong. If they had just gotten the first increment of money and started by implementing the kernel server, then maybe the project could have succeeded step by step. Instead, the project hit the jackpot, and they tried to refactor and redesign for the grand new budget, and things mostly went bad after that.
Another relevant example I could use would be Slashdot, though I don’t know how many of the people on LW are familiar with it. My perception is that the rolling ownership indicates a portable nuisance status, though the nuisance status may be some form of non-pressing debt rather than anything that threatens the existence of the website. Whatever the cause, it seems that Slashdot lacks the resources to fix even the oldest and best-known limitations of the system. (In particular, the moderation system of Slashdot would seem to need some adjustments.)
Hmm… I feel like my use of examples is diverging from the guidelines’ intended meaning for “concrete models”.
This topic of karma in general interests me, per my reaction to the karma project from 2019. However my question in response to this “site meta” item is: “Is there a karma explorer?” One side would be a way to see the basis of my own karma, but I would also like a way to understand the basis of the karma of other users. For example, I see that the author habryka has over 13,000 points of karma here and 242 points of karma somewhere else, but what does that actually mean? Does any of that karma represent reasons I should read comments from habryka with greater attention? (Right now it feels like there are a lot of magic numbers involved in karma calculations?)
More fuzzy reaction, but I feel like whatever forms the basis of karma, it should age over time. Recent contributions to karma should matter more than old ones.
Is this another karma-related topic? Your tags suggest otherwise, but I would like to see some of these dimensions as part of the karma metric, both for myself and for other people. Most of the examples you cite seem to be natural binary dimensions, but not fully orthogonal. Not sure what I should say here, but I’ll link to my longest comment on Less wrong on the topic of enhanced karma. As you are approaching the topic, such an approach would help me recognize “amiable” people and understand what makes them amiable. I doubt that becoming more amiable is one of my goals, but at least I could reflect on why not. Or perhaps most importantly I could look for the dimensions that reflect sincere amiability to filter against the fake amiability of the “charming sociopaths” you mentioned.
It’s hard to change or improve something without measuring it. I think you are describing a fairly complicated concept, but it might be possible to break it down into dimensions that are easier to assess. For example, if some of the assessments are related to specific comments or replies [our primary “actions” within LessWrong], then we could see what we are doing that affects various aspects of our “amiability”.
This demonstration of “Personality Insights” might help illustrate what I’m talking about. If you want to test it, I recommend clicking on the “Body of Text” tab and pasting in some of your writing. Then click on the “Analyze” button to get a display for some of the primary dimensions. If you then click on the “Sunburst visualization” link at the bottom, you’ll see more dimensions and how they are grouped. I think your notion of “amiability” may be within the cluster of “Agreeableness” dimensions.
Another way to think of it is related to the profiles that Facebook and the google have compiled for each of us. My understanding (from oldish reports) is that they are dealing with hundreds of dimensions. I would actually like to see my own profile and the data that created it. I might even disagree with some of the evaluations, but right now those evaluations are being used (and abused) without my knowledge.
Is your [Dogon’s] reference to “your model” a reference to ‘my [shanen’s] preferred financial model’ (obliquely referenced in the original question) or a reference to Vladimir_Nesov’s comment?
In the first case, my “preferred financial model” would involve cost recovery for services shared. An interesting example came up earlier in this discussion in relation to recognizing consistency in comments. One solution approach could involve sentiment analysis. In brief, if you change your sentiment back and forth as regards some topic, then that would indicate negative “consistency”, whereas if your sentiment towards the same topic is unchanged, then it indicates positive consistency. (If your sentiment changes rarely, then it indicates learning?) So in the context of my preferred (or fantasy) financial model, the question becomes “Are enough people willing to pay for that feature?”
Now things get more complicated and interesting in this case, because there are several ways to implement the feature in question. My hypothesis is that the solution would use a deep neural network trained to recognize sentiments. The tricky part is whether we yet know how to create such a neural network that can take a specific topic as an input. As far as I know, right now such a neural network needs to be trained for a specific domain, and the domain has to be narrowly defined. But for the sake of linking it to my financial model, I’m going to risk extending the hypothesis that way.
Now we get to an interesting branch point in the implementation of this feature for measuring consistency. Where do we do the calculations? As my financial model works, it would depend on which approach the users of the feature wanted to donate money for. I’m going to split it into three projects that could be funded:
Developing the deep neural network to analyze sentiments towards input topics. This is basically a prerequisite project and unless enough people are willing to fund this project the feature is DOA.
Analyzing the data with the neural network on the LW (LessWrong) side. In this version of consistency measurement there would be a lot of calculation on the LW side testing sentiments against topics, so there would be both a development project and a significant ongoing cost project. Both parts of this double project would need sufficient donor support to use this approach.
Analyzing the data with the neural network on the users’ side. In this version of consistency measurement, the tedious calculations could be removed from LW’s servers. The trained neural network would be downloaded and each person would calculate (and optionally share) the consistency metric using the data of that person’s own comments. The cost of the development project should be similar, but there wouldn’t need to be donors for a major ongoing cost project. (I would actually favor this version and be more likely to donate money for this version due to privacy considerations.)
(If there are enough donors, then both 2 and 3 could be supported. However, deciding which one to implement first could be determined by which project proposal attracts enough donors first.)
In the second case, I’m afraid I don’t understand what part of Vladimir_Nesov’s comment was about a “model”. And you weren’t talking to me, anyway. And I should also apologize for my longish and misdirected response?
Okay and you’re welcome, though I wish I had understood that part of the discussion more clearly. Can I blame it on the ambiguity of second-person references where many people are involved? (An advantage of the Japanese language in minimizing pronoun usage?)
I was actually looking for an errata page for the minor mistake on page 119, where it says “three billion” for “three million”. The notes are clear, but it still stuck a thumb in my eye.
For what it’s worth, I rate the book as good, though a bit drier than The Willpower Instinct. Also, this book seemed less focused on specific things to do.