Not to put too fine a point on it: through the tone and content of the post, I can still see the old attachments and subconscious messed-up strategies shining through.
I am, of course, not free of blame here because the same could be said about my comment.
However, I reach out over both of these and touch you, Val.
Sure, and that’s probably what almost all users do. But the situation is still perverse: the broken incentives of the system are fighting against your private incentive to not waste effort.
This kind of conflict is especially bad if people have different levels of the internal incentive, but also bad even they don’t, because on the margin it pushes everyone to act slightly against their preferences. (I don’t think this particular case is really so bad, but the more general phenomenon is and that’s what you get if you design systems with poor incentives)
Ultimately the primary constraint on almost any feature on LessWrong is UI complexity, and so there is a very strong prior against any specific passing the very high bar to make it into the final UI
On the low end, you can fit the idea entirely inside of the existing UI, as a new fancy way of calculating voting weights under the hood (and allowing multiple clicks on the voting buttons).
Then, in a rough order of less to more shocking to users:
showing the user some indication of how many points their one click is currently worth
showing how many unused “voting points” they still have (privately)
showing a breakdown of recevied feedback into positive and negative votes
some simple configuration that allows to change the default allocation of budget to one click (e.g. how many percent, or pick a fixed value)
And that’s probably all you ever need?
This in particular limits the degree to which you can force the user to spend a limited number of resources, since it both strongly increases mental overhead (instead of just asking themselves “yay or nay?” after reading a comment, they now need to reason about their limited budget and compare it to alternative options)
This should be much less of an issue if the configuration of this is global and has reasonable defaults. Then it’s pretty much reduced to “new fancy way of calculating voting weights”, and the users should be fine with just being roughly aware that if they vote lots lots or don’t post anything on their own, their individual votes will have less weight.
I’m still not really sure what the root issues you’re trying to resolve are. What are examples of cases you’re either worried about the current system specifically failing, or areas where we just little don’t have anything even trying to handle a particular use-case?
Sure, I can list some examples, but first note that while I agree that examples are useful, focusing on them too much is not a good way in general to think about designing systems.
A good design can preempt issues that you would never have predicted could happen; a bad design will screw you up in similarly unpredictable ways. What you want to look out for is designs which reflect the computational structure of the problem you are trying to solve. If you cannot think about it in these terms, I don’t think you’ll be persuaded by any specific list of benefits of the proposed system, such as:
multiple voting is natural, safe, and easy to implement
reduced room for downvote abuse, spamming and nepotism (see example in the post)
it’s possible to change how static karma translates into voting power without disrupting the ecosystem (because the calculations you change affect the marginal voting power, not the total voting power)
users can choose their voting strategy (e.g. many low-impact votes or few high-impact ones) without being incentivized to waste time (in the current system, more clicks = more impact)
moderation power is quantitative, allowing things like partial trust, trial periods and temporary stand-ins without bad feelings afterward (instead of “become moderator” and then “unbecome moderator” we have “I trust you enough to give you 1000 moderation power, no strings attached—let’s see what you do with it”)
each user is incentivized to balance downvotes against upvotes (in the current system, the incentive is to downvote everything you don’t upvote to double your signal—and this would stopped only by some artifical intervention?)
Etc. etc. Does it feel like you could generate more pros (and cons) if you set a 5 minute timer? Ultimately, there is nothing I can say to replace you figuring these out.
This is very well done :) Thanks for the Terence Tao link—it’s amusing that he describes exactly the same meta-level observation which I expressed in this post.
Classes of interpersonal problems often translate into classes of intrapersonal problems, and the tools to solve them are broadly similar.
This is true, but it seems you don’t have any ideas about why it’s true. I offer the following theory: if you are designing brains to deal with social situations, it is very adaptive to design them in a way that internally mirrors some of the structure that arises in social environments. This makes the computations performed by the brain more directly applicable to social life, in several interesting ways (e.g. increased ability to take/simulate various points of view, simulate and exploit adversarial situations, operate under mismatched/fake sets of pretenses etc.).
We should expect that anyone should be able to get over 1000 karma if they hang around the site long enough.
I second this worry. Historically, karma on LW has been a very good indicator of hours of life burned on the site, and a somewhat worse indicator of other things.
Excellent content, would be even beter in a shorter post.
As a 5-minute exercise, I’m coming up with some more examples:
assume that you can make progress on AI alignment
or at least, assume that there is some way in which you can contribute to saving the world
run fast enough to win the race, even if it means you won’t make it to the finish
assume you will earn enough money to survive while doing things you care about
assume the brain of the person who stopped breathing is still alive
sign up for cryonics
assume your epistemology is good enough to ignore “common sense” and not be crazy
assume your readers like your writing
assume your readers like your writing enough so that there’s really nothing you need to prove to anyone anymore
assume you don’t need to prove your worth to other people
assume your best ideas will be understood
Obvious note: this sequence of posts is by itself a good example of what circumambulation looks like in practice.
Well, if ageing was slowed proportionally, and the world were roughly unchanged from the present condition, I’d expect large utility gains (in total subjective QoL) from prioritizing longer lives, with diminishing returns to this only in late 100s or possibly 1000s. But I think both assumptions are extremely unlikely.
I think at this point it’s fair to say that you have started repeating yourself, and your recent posts strongly evoke the “man with a hammer” syndrome. Yes, your basic insight describes a real aspect of some part of reality. It’s cool, we got it. But it’s not the only aspect, and (I think) also not the most interesting one. After three or four posts on the same topic, it might be worth looking for new material to process, and other insights to find.
I get links like this:
https://www.lesserwrong.com/feed.xml?view=%5Bobject%20Object%5D&karmaThreshold=0
One concrete scenario is: front page contains posts A(1 karma), B(2 karma) and C(3 karma). You subscribe to a RSS feed (frontpage, karmaThreshold=0) and it contains C, B (assuming max feed size is 2). RSS reader shows new articles C, B. Then someone downvotes C to −1 karma. The RSS feed contains B, A. RSS reader shows A as a new article. Note that this is not the full extent of the problem but I do not fully understand the other issues around this, like at some point I had 30 articles from Conor’s sequence mysteriously pop up at the front of my “frontpage” subscription marked as new.
It’s pretty much the case that the only usable RSS setup (that has no obvious compatibility issues) is having it act as a fixed-length FIFO queue, with no changes allowed except insertion of new entries at the beginning.
The babble layer is lively and it makes the post very enjoyable to read.
However, while the central claim contains a grain of truth, I’d be wary of turning it into advice. How much your cognition depends on the choice of words (and their length) is to a significant degree a matter of how you design it. It’s a learnable skill to think mostly with non-verbal concepts, and translate them into words only at the latest possible time.
A significant confounder here is that currently aging impacts congnitive function, in a way that has impact on these calculations. The solution would largely depend on the specific way in which the aging process is prevented.
Your post is useful, and also very well written and structured to the point that there isn’t much left to comment on. I’m leaving this comment as a way to give more specific encouragement than just upvoting.
[Note: you post is intentionally poetic, so I’ll let myself be intentionally poetic while answering this:]
The correct answer is, I think, “don’t care”. On Friday night you dance with a Gervais-sociopath. On Saturday you build a moon rocket together and use it to pick up groceries. Do you “trust” the rocket to be “good”? No, but you don’t need to.