I am gradually updating in favour of the hypothesis that at least one of the admins either approves of mass-downvoting as a means of influencing LW culture, or else has a strong enough dislike for the sort of ideas that appear to be be the targets of mass-downvoting at present that s/he considers the mass-downvoting to be a good thing.
I have a prior that admins don’t consider karma important and think of up/downvoting issues as middle-school-level status/power games. “Mommy, he hid all my pencils and wrote a bad word on my locker door!”
It seems unlikely that both of these are true: (1) Having a karma system is a good thing for LW. (2) Issues related to the karma system, even ones that crop up repeatedly and produce a great deal of discussion and (it appears) strong feelings, should be treated as middle-school-level status games.
I don’t see problems with these two statements being jointly true provided the “good thing” in (1) is understood as a mild and minor good, and provided the “strong feelings” in (2) are limited to not too many people.
There is also TANSTAAFL. Attempting to control voting patterns will impose costs and some people are already uncomfortable with possible costs.
I agree that trying to control voting patterns will have costs. But the question here isn’t whether anyone should be trying to control voting patterns, it’s whether someone with admin responsibility on LW should be taking notice of this affair and making some comment. (Even if the comment is “Oh, for goodness’ sake, grow up and stop bothering yourselves about this unimportant stuff.”.)
Can you expand on your reasons for considering that conjunction unlikely?
I understand what you’re trying to imply here, but arriving there seems to depend on a lot of unstated assumptions (e.g., assumptions about what the admins’ goals are, about the heterogeneity of the LW community and the collective goals/attributes of various subsets of it, about what the alternatives are to some people treating karma as a middle-school-level status game, etc.) that it might be valuable to articulate (and think through) with more precision.
Can you expand on your reasons for considering that conjunction unlikely?
I confess it’s mostly a matter of gut feeling (“I try not to think with my gut”—Carl Sagan) and you’re right that there might be value in being more careful about it.
So it goes something like this. Suppose that, on balance, the karma-related concerns of LW users—including long-standing smart people like ialdabaoth—are “middle-school-level status games” or something equivalent thereto. That seems to indicate that being concerned much about karma is contemptible: that, e.g., it’s just plain silly to think it matters if someone loses hundreds or thousands of karma points because some other user has a grudge, or if hundreds or thousands of comments have bad-looking negative scores next to them, or aren’t displayed at all, because their authors happen to have annoyed someone in the past.
But it seems to me that if there’s any point to the karma system, it’s some combination of these things: (1) It motivates people to write high-quality articles and comments. (2) It helps guide readers to articles and comments more likely to be interesting or insightful. (3, much less important in my view) It helps give a rough indication of who’s likely to be worth paying attention to.
But I don’t think any halfway-normal human being can simultaneously be motivated by preferring a high karma score, and be unbothered by losing thousands of karma points because someone holds a grudge. I don’t think it can be right not to care whether hundreds or thousands of comments are misleadingly labelled, if the labels and the karma-based sorting heuristics are useful. It can’t make sense to have your opinion of a person coloured by their karma score, but also not to care if some people’s karma is reduced by hundreds or thousands of points because some obnoxious person has a grudge against them.
I’m quite happy to take seriously either side of the disjunction. It might be that the whole karma system is a distraction and that we should ignore the whole thing, in which case we probably shouldn’t care about the sort of behaviour ialdabaoth is protesting here. (Only probably. It could be that the karma system is a distraction but that, given that it’s there, we should care whether people’s feelings get hurt gratuitously.) It might be that the karma system has a positive motivational effect or provides useful information or both, in which case we probably should care about the sort of behaviour ialdabaoth is protesting here.
Could it be that different sides of the disjunction apply to different people, somehow? For instance, maybe the karma system is valuable because it motivates and informs newcomers—but as they “grow up” they should put away childish things and attend only to the actual content rather than the scores? Yes, it could (though I’m not convinced it is). But in that case, it seems to me that this sort of abuse is worth paying attention to. If we care enough about newcomers (or any other subcommunity we might decide the karma machinery exists for the sake of) to put up with what’s a distraction for everyone else, then we should also care enough about them to take notice when that thing-that’s-a-distraction-for-others is badly messed up.
I should perhaps add that even if we ended up agreeing that the right attitude is not to care about karma, the fact that this sort of thing has clearly annoyed and upset ialdabaoth and pretty much driven daenerys away seems like cause for concern. (Supposing that upsetting and driving away those people is considered a bad thing. It’s entirely possible that whoever is engaged in mass-downvoting considers driving daenerys away from Less Wrong a triumph and annoying ialdabaoth a victory. I decline to share their views, if so.)
OK. So, we’ve identified a few implicit assumptions here.
Being concerned about middle-school-level status games is contemptible; it’s just plain silly to think it matters.
It is highly unlikely that anyone is both motivated by total karma and unconcerned if their karma is reduced significantly by capricious acts of rogue agents.
More generally, it is senseless to both treat karma score as evidence of the worth of someone’s contributions and not to care if some people’s karma is reduced significantly by capricious acts of rogue agents.
Have I mischaracterized any of these?
For my own part, I think #3 is false, #2 might be true but ought not be, and #1 is both false and so pernicious as to be actively harmful to real people in the world.
On #1: I think calling something “middle-school-level” is, when applied to something done by intelligent adults, itself a term of contempt. I would not use that term to describe something I thought worth caring about. (I remark for clarity that it wasn’t I who used the term to describe concerns about karma.)
On #2: I agree that an ideal reasoner could have both those properties but am fairly sure that very few real human beings (even in the rather unusual LW population) do, whence my remark about halfway-normal human beings.
On #3: “Senseless” is too strong but if there are rogue agents engaging in such capricious acts then the value of karma score as an indication of the worth of someone’s contributions is reduced. More noise, less SNR. So if you find karma useful as a rough guide to a person’s level of useful contribution, you should be able at having noise added to it. (You might of course be glad of the noise for other reasons, e.g. if you wanted a particular category of person to be intimidated.)
On #3: Fair enough… I agree that if I use the signal, I should prefer that the noise in that signal be lower, all else being equal. So, yes, in that sense I should care. Agreed.
On #2: Yeah, that’s why I agreed that it might be true.
On #1:We may just have to agree to disagree on this one, as I’m too infuriated by what you’re saying to engage with it reasonably.
No, I don’t think it’s miscommunication, nor is it your fault at all. I’m just being emotionally oversensitive due to personal stuff, exacerbated by the fact that I learned today that a family member died and am processing that.
But.. well, OK, let me try to sneak up on it a little. Suppose it were true that someone I loved had killed themselves as a consequence of their experiences with being bullied in middle school. (This is in fact not at all true.) Does it make any sense that I would react strongly and negatively to dismissing middle-school-level status maneuvering as silly, and dismissing concern with it as contemptible?
As to the middle-school-level business, let me try to answer your question and some other allied questions that might be relevant:
I was not saying, and do not believe, that there is anything contemptible or silly going on when people in middle school engage in middle-school-level anything.
I was not saying, and do not believe, that concern with karma and such matters is in fact either (1) middle-school-level status manoeuvring or (2) contemptible.
I didn’t intend to say, though maybe I did by mistake, that everything that could be described as middle-school-level status manoeuvring is contemptible.
What I did say, and did intend to say, is that specifically calling something “middle-school-level”, if the thing in question is being done by adults of (at least) normal mental capacity, is typically an expression of contempt. (And, in particular, I interpreted Lumifer as intending either to express such contempt on his own behalf or at least to imply that the LW admins might see debates and angst over karma as contemptible.)
I suppose none of those is actually an answer to your question (I’m hoping that the above may bypass it, as it were) but here is one: In such a situation I can entirely see how you might have that reaction, and I’d regard it as a reasonable but maybe not a rational, reaction to have.
I would also agree that calling something “middle-school-level” when being done by adults suggests that the adult in question is not particularly competent. E.g., I might talk about trying to find my way around Berlin using middle-school German. Whether this expresses contempt or not depends a lot on the subject and the context.
I would add that many people don’t seem to get better at managing status games than a slightly above-average high-schooler, though that’s probably not true for middle school.
I have a prior that admins don’t consider karma important and think of up/downvoting issues as middle-school-level status/power games. “Mommy, he hid all my pencils and wrote a bad word on my locker door!”
That’s very possible.
It seems unlikely that both of these are true: (1) Having a karma system is a good thing for LW. (2) Issues related to the karma system, even ones that crop up repeatedly and produce a great deal of discussion and (it appears) strong feelings, should be treated as middle-school-level status games.
I don’t see problems with these two statements being jointly true provided the “good thing” in (1) is understood as a mild and minor good, and provided the “strong feelings” in (2) are limited to not too many people.
There is also TANSTAAFL. Attempting to control voting patterns will impose costs and some people are already uncomfortable with possible costs.
See my comments to TheOtherDave.
I agree that trying to control voting patterns will have costs. But the question here isn’t whether anyone should be trying to control voting patterns, it’s whether someone with admin responsibility on LW should be taking notice of this affair and making some comment. (Even if the comment is “Oh, for goodness’ sake, grow up and stop bothering yourselves about this unimportant stuff.”.)
Can you expand on your reasons for considering that conjunction unlikely?
I understand what you’re trying to imply here, but arriving there seems to depend on a lot of unstated assumptions (e.g., assumptions about what the admins’ goals are, about the heterogeneity of the LW community and the collective goals/attributes of various subsets of it, about what the alternatives are to some people treating karma as a middle-school-level status game, etc.) that it might be valuable to articulate (and think through) with more precision.
I confess it’s mostly a matter of gut feeling (“I try not to think with my gut”—Carl Sagan) and you’re right that there might be value in being more careful about it.
So it goes something like this. Suppose that, on balance, the karma-related concerns of LW users—including long-standing smart people like ialdabaoth—are “middle-school-level status games” or something equivalent thereto. That seems to indicate that being concerned much about karma is contemptible: that, e.g., it’s just plain silly to think it matters if someone loses hundreds or thousands of karma points because some other user has a grudge, or if hundreds or thousands of comments have bad-looking negative scores next to them, or aren’t displayed at all, because their authors happen to have annoyed someone in the past.
But it seems to me that if there’s any point to the karma system, it’s some combination of these things: (1) It motivates people to write high-quality articles and comments. (2) It helps guide readers to articles and comments more likely to be interesting or insightful. (3, much less important in my view) It helps give a rough indication of who’s likely to be worth paying attention to.
But I don’t think any halfway-normal human being can simultaneously be motivated by preferring a high karma score, and be unbothered by losing thousands of karma points because someone holds a grudge. I don’t think it can be right not to care whether hundreds or thousands of comments are misleadingly labelled, if the labels and the karma-based sorting heuristics are useful. It can’t make sense to have your opinion of a person coloured by their karma score, but also not to care if some people’s karma is reduced by hundreds or thousands of points because some obnoxious person has a grudge against them.
I’m quite happy to take seriously either side of the disjunction. It might be that the whole karma system is a distraction and that we should ignore the whole thing, in which case we probably shouldn’t care about the sort of behaviour ialdabaoth is protesting here. (Only probably. It could be that the karma system is a distraction but that, given that it’s there, we should care whether people’s feelings get hurt gratuitously.) It might be that the karma system has a positive motivational effect or provides useful information or both, in which case we probably should care about the sort of behaviour ialdabaoth is protesting here.
Could it be that different sides of the disjunction apply to different people, somehow? For instance, maybe the karma system is valuable because it motivates and informs newcomers—but as they “grow up” they should put away childish things and attend only to the actual content rather than the scores? Yes, it could (though I’m not convinced it is). But in that case, it seems to me that this sort of abuse is worth paying attention to. If we care enough about newcomers (or any other subcommunity we might decide the karma machinery exists for the sake of) to put up with what’s a distraction for everyone else, then we should also care enough about them to take notice when that thing-that’s-a-distraction-for-others is badly messed up.
I should perhaps add that even if we ended up agreeing that the right attitude is not to care about karma, the fact that this sort of thing has clearly annoyed and upset ialdabaoth and pretty much driven daenerys away seems like cause for concern. (Supposing that upsetting and driving away those people is considered a bad thing. It’s entirely possible that whoever is engaged in mass-downvoting considers driving daenerys away from Less Wrong a triumph and annoying ialdabaoth a victory. I decline to share their views, if so.)
OK. So, we’ve identified a few implicit assumptions here.
Being concerned about middle-school-level status games is contemptible; it’s just plain silly to think it matters.
It is highly unlikely that anyone is both motivated by total karma and unconcerned if their karma is reduced significantly by capricious acts of rogue agents.
More generally, it is senseless to both treat karma score as evidence of the worth of someone’s contributions and not to care if some people’s karma is reduced significantly by capricious acts of rogue agents.
Have I mischaracterized any of these?
For my own part, I think #3 is false, #2 might be true but ought not be, and #1 is both false and so pernicious as to be actively harmful to real people in the world.
On #1: I think calling something “middle-school-level” is, when applied to something done by intelligent adults, itself a term of contempt. I would not use that term to describe something I thought worth caring about. (I remark for clarity that it wasn’t I who used the term to describe concerns about karma.)
On #2: I agree that an ideal reasoner could have both those properties but am fairly sure that very few real human beings (even in the rather unusual LW population) do, whence my remark about halfway-normal human beings.
On #3: “Senseless” is too strong but if there are rogue agents engaging in such capricious acts then the value of karma score as an indication of the worth of someone’s contributions is reduced. More noise, less SNR. So if you find karma useful as a rough guide to a person’s level of useful contribution, you should be able at having noise added to it. (You might of course be glad of the noise for other reasons, e.g. if you wanted a particular category of person to be intimidated.)
On #3: Fair enough… I agree that if I use the signal, I should prefer that the noise in that signal be lower, all else being equal. So, yes, in that sense I should care. Agreed.
On #2: Yeah, that’s why I agreed that it might be true.
On #1:We may just have to agree to disagree on this one, as I’m too infuriated by what you’re saying to engage with it reasonably.
Oh! I can’t help wondering whether there’s some miscommunication going on here. Could you explain what infuriates you so?
No, I don’t think it’s miscommunication, nor is it your fault at all. I’m just being emotionally oversensitive due to personal stuff, exacerbated by the fact that I learned today that a family member died and am processing that.
But.. well, OK, let me try to sneak up on it a little.
Suppose it were true that someone I loved had killed themselves as a consequence of their experiences with being bullied in middle school. (This is in fact not at all true.)
Does it make any sense that I would react strongly and negatively to dismissing middle-school-level status maneuvering as silly, and dismissing concern with it as contemptible?
Oh, shit. I’m sorry.
As to the middle-school-level business, let me try to answer your question and some other allied questions that might be relevant:
I was not saying, and do not believe, that there is anything contemptible or silly going on when people in middle school engage in middle-school-level anything.
I was not saying, and do not believe, that concern with karma and such matters is in fact either (1) middle-school-level status manoeuvring or (2) contemptible.
I didn’t intend to say, though maybe I did by mistake, that everything that could be described as middle-school-level status manoeuvring is contemptible.
What I did say, and did intend to say, is that specifically calling something “middle-school-level”, if the thing in question is being done by adults of (at least) normal mental capacity, is typically an expression of contempt. (And, in particular, I interpreted Lumifer as intending either to express such contempt on his own behalf or at least to imply that the LW admins might see debates and angst over karma as contemptible.)
I suppose none of those is actually an answer to your question (I’m hoping that the above may bypass it, as it were) but here is one: In such a situation I can entirely see how you might have that reaction, and I’d regard it as a reasonable but maybe not a rational, reaction to have.
[EDITED to try to fix a formatting screwup.]
I would also agree that calling something “middle-school-level” when being done by adults suggests that the adult in question is not particularly competent. E.g., I might talk about trying to find my way around Berlin using middle-school German. Whether this expresses contempt or not depends a lot on the subject and the context.
I would add that many people don’t seem to get better at managing status games than a slightly above-average high-schooler, though that’s probably not true for middle school.
I would agree that it’s not an entirely rational reaction to have.
I don’t think so: measures such as the hiding of below-threshold threads (pushed for by EY) make karma less unimportant that it used to be.