While this post has +40 upvotes, the majority of the top-voted comments are skeptical of it. I think this represents confusion as to how to upvote, although this is merely a hypothesis. The article surveys a very interesting topic that is right in the sweet spot of interest for this community, it also appears scholarly, however the conclusions synthesized by the author strike me as naive and I suspect that’s also the conclusion of the majority. Whether it deserves an upvote is debateable. I downvoted.
I felt the confusion you are talking about. If readers could be expected to read the top-voted replies (RTFC), then the current distribution of votes would be ideal: The interesting article gets some well-deserved attention, and the skeptical replies give a counterbalance. But if readers don’t read the comments, then frankly I think this article got too many upvotes when compared to many others.
Offtopic: Is there a meta thread somewhere discussing the semantics of votes? I am happy that we don’t use slashdot’s baroque insightful/interesting/funny distinctions, but some consensus about the meaning of +1 would be nice.
I don’t know about a meta-thread, but the rule of thumb I’ve seen quoted often is “upvote what you want more of; downvote what you want less of.” Karma scores are intended, on this view, as an indicator of how many people (net) want more entries like that.
One implication of this view is that a score of 40 isn’t “ten times better” than a score of 4, it just means that many more people want to see posts like this than don’t want to.
Of course, this view competes with people’s entirely predictable tendency to treat karma as an indicator of the entry’s (and the user’s) overall worth, or as a game to maximize one’s score on, or as a form of reward/punishment.
Equally predictably, this predictable but unintended use of karma far far far outweighs the intended use.
While this post has +40 upvotes, the majority of the top-voted comments are skeptical of it. I think this represents confusion as to how to upvote, although this is merely a hypothesis. The article surveys a very interesting topic that is right in the sweet spot of interest for this community, it also appears scholarly, however the conclusions synthesized by the author strike me as naive and I suspect that’s also the conclusion of the majority. Whether it deserves an upvote is debateable. I downvoted.
I felt the confusion you are talking about. If readers could be expected to read the top-voted replies (RTFC), then the current distribution of votes would be ideal: The interesting article gets some well-deserved attention, and the skeptical replies give a counterbalance. But if readers don’t read the comments, then frankly I think this article got too many upvotes when compared to many others.
Offtopic: Is there a meta thread somewhere discussing the semantics of votes? I am happy that we don’t use slashdot’s baroque insightful/interesting/funny distinctions, but some consensus about the meaning of +1 would be nice.
I don’t know about a meta-thread, but the rule of thumb I’ve seen quoted often is “upvote what you want more of; downvote what you want less of.” Karma scores are intended, on this view, as an indicator of how many people (net) want more entries like that.
One implication of this view is that a score of 40 isn’t “ten times better” than a score of 4, it just means that many more people want to see posts like this than don’t want to.
Of course, this view competes with people’s entirely predictable tendency to treat karma as an indicator of the entry’s (and the user’s) overall worth, or as a game to maximize one’s score on, or as a form of reward/punishment.
Equally predictably, this predictable but unintended use of karma far far far outweighs the intended use.
Karma-maximizing is often but not always a good approximation to worth-as-judged-by-community maximizing, which is a good thing to maximize.
Yes. The question is how significant the gap between “often” and “always” is.
Though if you have a target audience in mind, it is sometimes worth posting things that will be downvoted by the community-at-large.
(I’ve been doing this a lot recently, though I plan on cutting back and regaining some general rationalist credibility.)
The new meta-thread is due, feel free to make it. http://lesswrong.com/lw/1w4/fall_2010_meta_thread/