I have added two new reacts: “I’d bet this is false” and “I’d bet this is true”.
You can now sort a given user’s comments by ‘top’ i.e. by karma.
For the first one, if you want to let someone know you’d be willing to take a bet (or if you want to call someone out on their bullshit) you can now highlight the claim they made and use the react. The react is a pair of dice, because we’re never certain about propositions we’re betting on (and because ‘a hand offering money’ was too hard to make out at the small scale). Hopefully this will increase people’s affordance to take more bets on the site!
These reacts replaced “I checked it’s true” and “I checked it’s false”, which didn’t get that much use, but were some of the most abused reacts (often used on opinions or statements-of-positions that were simply not checkable).
For the second, if you go to a user profile and scroll down to the comments, you can now sort by ‘top’, ‘newest’, ‘oldest’, and ‘recent replies’. I find that ‘top’ is a great way to get a sense of a person’s thoughts and perspective on the world, and I used to visit greaterwrong a lot for this feature. Now you can do it on LessWrong!
This feels pretty nitpick-y, but whether or not I’d be interested in taking a bet will depend on the odds—in many cases I might take either side, given a reasonably wide spread. Maybe append at p >= 0.5 to the descriptions to clarify?
The shorthand trading syntax “$size @ $sell_percent / $buy_percent” is especially nice because it expresses the spread you’d accept to take either side of the bet, e.g. “25 @ 85⁄15 on rain tomorrow” to offer a bet of $25 dollars, selling if you think probability of rain is >85%, buying if you think it’s <15%. Seems hard to build this into a reaction though!
The only reason I’ve not already done this is that there’s already a lot of text in the hover-over
I’m willing to operationalize this, find an adjudicator, and bet this claim is true
Another option is that you could pair the “I’d bet on this” react with a probability react. There could be a single react that says “I’m willing to be on this” and then you also react with one of <1%, 10%, 25%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 75%, 90%, 99+%, so that people know what odds you’d take.
lol we did have a debate about this internally before shipping.
Right now we’re trying to get a rough sense of ‘would people make more bets on LW if they had more affordance to?’, and an easy thing to try was just making some reacts. But a) I encourage people to reply with followup details if they are interested in betting, and b) if it turns out reasonably popular we may make a more dedicated feature.
I like #2. On a similar thread: would be nice to have a separate section for pinned comments. I looked into pull requesting it at one point but looks like it either isn’t as trivial as I hoped, or I simply got lost in the code. I feel like folks having more affordance to say, “Contrary to its upvotes or recency, I think this is one of the most representative comments from me, and others seeing my page should see it” would be helpful—pinning does this already but it has ui drawbacks because it simply pushes recent comments out of the way and the pinned marker is quite small (hence why I edit my pinned comments to say they’re pinned).
I was pretty sad about the ongoing distortion of “I checked” in what’s meant to be an epistemics-oriented community. I think the actual meanings are potentially really valuable, but without some way of avoiding them getting eaten, they become a hazard.
My first thought is to put a barrier in the way, but I don’t know if that plays well with the reactions system being for lower-overhead responses, and it might also give people unproductive bad feelings unless sold the right way.
Two recent changes to LessWrong that I made!
I have added two new reacts: “I’d bet this is false” and “I’d bet this is true”.
You can now sort a given user’s comments by ‘top’ i.e. by karma.
For the first one, if you want to let someone know you’d be willing to take a bet (or if you want to call someone out on their bullshit) you can now highlight the claim they made and use the react. The react is a pair of dice, because we’re never certain about propositions we’re betting on (and because ‘a hand offering money’ was too hard to make out at the small scale). Hopefully this will increase people’s affordance to take more bets on the site!
These reacts replaced “I checked it’s true” and “I checked it’s false”, which didn’t get that much use, but were some of the most abused reacts (often used on opinions or statements-of-positions that were simply not checkable).
For the second, if you go to a user profile and scroll down to the comments, you can now sort by ‘top’, ‘newest’, ‘oldest’, and ‘recent replies’. I find that ‘top’ is a great way to get a sense of a person’s thoughts and perspective on the world, and I used to visit greaterwrong a lot for this feature. Now you can do it on LessWrong!
This feels pretty nitpick-y, but whether or not I’d be interested in taking a bet will depend on the odds—in many cases I might take either side, given a reasonably wide spread. Maybe append
at p >= 0.5to the descriptions to clarify?The shorthand trading syntax “$size @ $sell_percent / $buy_percent” is especially nice because it expresses the spread you’d accept to take either side of the bet, e.g. “25 @ 85⁄15 on rain tomorrow” to offer a bet of $25 dollars, selling if you think probability of rain is >85%, buying if you think it’s <15%. Seems hard to build this into a reaction though!
The only reason I’ve not already done this is that there’s already a lot of text in the hover-over
Another option is that you could pair the “I’d bet on this” react with a probability react. There could be a single react that says “I’m willing to be on this” and then you also react with one of <1%, 10%, 25%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 75%, 90%, 99+%, so that people know what odds you’d take.
lol we did have a debate about this internally before shipping.
Right now we’re trying to get a rough sense of ‘would people make more bets on LW if they had more affordance to?’, and an easy thing to try was just making some reacts. But a) I encourage people to reply with followup details if they are interested in betting, and b) if it turns out reasonably popular we may make a more dedicated feature.
(FYI I was happy to see your recent bet with BenG, and am hoping more things like that happen)
I like #2. On a similar thread: would be nice to have a separate section for pinned comments. I looked into pull requesting it at one point but looks like it either isn’t as trivial as I hoped, or I simply got lost in the code. I feel like folks having more affordance to say, “Contrary to its upvotes or recency, I think this is one of the most representative comments from me, and others seeing my page should see it” would be helpful—pinning does this already but it has ui drawbacks because it simply pushes recent comments out of the way and the pinned marker is quite small (hence why I edit my pinned comments to say they’re pinned).
Suggestion: the two dice should have different numbers on top, maybe a ⚅ on the “true” bet instead of a ⚀.
The comment option sorting is amazing! Thanks!
The new reacts are also cool, though I also liked the “I checked” reacts and would have liked to have both.
I was pretty sad about the ongoing distortion of “I checked” in what’s meant to be an epistemics-oriented community. I think the actual meanings are potentially really valuable, but without some way of avoiding them getting eaten, they become a hazard.
My first thought is to put a barrier in the way, but I don’t know if that plays well with the reactions system being for lower-overhead responses, and it might also give people unproductive bad feelings unless sold the right way.