Let’s say I read a post that’s math heavy. I don’t understand all the math but otherwise the post seems great.
Do I upvote the post?
If the post has 100% upvotes with 3 total votes I will probably upvote. If the post has 100% downvotes with 3 total votes I won’t upvote because it probably means that there’s an error in the math that I don’t see because my math background isn’t as strong as the math background of some other people on LW.
Did the upvotes or downvotes biased me in a negative way just because I changed my behavior? I don’t think so. It provided meaningful information on which I made my decision.
But the point of voting is for you to be a provider of information, not to be a consumer of information. If your vote is simply reflecting the information content already available from the other votes, what have you added? Put in LW terms, your vote should entangled with information unique to you. If the only information it is entangled with is other votes, then you’re just perpetuating an information cascade. This isn’t Hollywood Squares. The point of voting isn’t to “win”. It’s not to pat yourself on the back for upvoting useful posts. It’s to provide people with useful information about whether the post is useful. When you’re deciding whether to upvote, you shouldn’t be asking “Do I think this post is useful?”, but “Is this post, given the current vote total more likely to be useful than other posts with the same post total?”
If your vote is simply reflecting the information content already available from the other votes, what have you added?
In that case I don’t have added any information but I also didn’t put any wrong information into the system. In most cases voting will be a combination of adding new information and repeating back information that already available.
It’s not to pat yourself on the back for upvoting useful posts.
While not being the main point of voting, feeling good about upvoting useful post is desirable. Having a sense of community is good. Cooperation among people on LW is good. We don’t want to foster an environment where everyone feels like his on his own but a environment where people feel like they are cooperating with each other.
you shouldn’t be asking “Do I think this post is useful?”, but “Is this post, given the current vote total more likely to be useful than other posts with the same post total?”
I disagree. If a lot of people find a post useful because it helped them, I think that’s a valuable signal for the person who wrote the post. Answering an easy question when voting leads to more voting than asking a more complicated question.
Is the point of karma to provide feedback to the poster or the potential audience? It seems like these are both being used to determine whether to upvote. Maybe there should be explicit;y separate karma scores for different goals.
Perhaps posts should be evaluated on more comprehensive criteria:
Helpful to me
Relative value compared to other posts
Feedback on post quality to author
I’m not really sure where the line is between not enough things to rate and too many though. But I’ve never been comfortable with single number systems.
Let’s say I read a post that’s math heavy. I don’t understand all the math but otherwise the post seems great.
Do I upvote the post?
If the post has 100% upvotes with 3 total votes I will probably upvote. If the post has 100% downvotes with 3 total votes I won’t upvote because it probably means that there’s an error in the math that I don’t see because my math background isn’t as strong as the math background of some other people on LW.
Did the upvotes or downvotes biased me in a negative way just because I changed my behavior? I don’t think so. It provided meaningful information on which I made my decision.
But the point of voting is for you to be a provider of information, not to be a consumer of information. If your vote is simply reflecting the information content already available from the other votes, what have you added? Put in LW terms, your vote should entangled with information unique to you. If the only information it is entangled with is other votes, then you’re just perpetuating an information cascade. This isn’t Hollywood Squares. The point of voting isn’t to “win”. It’s not to pat yourself on the back for upvoting useful posts. It’s to provide people with useful information about whether the post is useful. When you’re deciding whether to upvote, you shouldn’t be asking “Do I think this post is useful?”, but “Is this post, given the current vote total more likely to be useful than other posts with the same post total?”
In that case I don’t have added any information but I also didn’t put any wrong information into the system. In most cases voting will be a combination of adding new information and repeating back information that already available.
While not being the main point of voting, feeling good about upvoting useful post is desirable. Having a sense of community is good. Cooperation among people on LW is good. We don’t want to foster an environment where everyone feels like his on his own but a environment where people feel like they are cooperating with each other.
I disagree. If a lot of people find a post useful because it helped them, I think that’s a valuable signal for the person who wrote the post. Answering an easy question when voting leads to more voting than asking a more complicated question.
You put in the information that there was a forth independent vote, when in fact there wasn’t.
But the upvotes themselves don’t affect how useful the post is, it just affects how useful you think it is.
Is the point of karma to provide feedback to the poster or the potential audience? It seems like these are both being used to determine whether to upvote. Maybe there should be explicit;y separate karma scores for different goals.
Perhaps posts should be evaluated on more comprehensive criteria: Helpful to me Relative value compared to other posts Feedback on post quality to author
I’m not really sure where the line is between not enough things to rate and too many though. But I’ve never been comfortable with single number systems.