Regarding the three threads you list, I, others involved in managing of LessWrong, and leading community figures who’ve spoken to me are all dissatisfied with how those conversations went and believe it calls for changes in LessWrong.
I’m deeply surprised by this. If there is a consensus among the LW managers and community figures, could one of them write a post about it laying out what was dissatisfactory and what changes they feel need to be made, or at least the result they want from the changes? I know you’re a highly conscientious person with too much on zir hands already, so please don’t take this upon yourself.
I am also surprised by this! I think this sentence is kind of true, and am dissatisfied with the threads, but I don’t feel like my take is particularly well-summarized with the above language, at least in the context of this post (like, I feel like this sentence implies a particular type of agreement with the OP that I don’t think summarizes my current position very well, though I am also not totally confident I disagree with the OP).
I am in favor of experimenting more with some karma stuff, and have been encouraging people to work on that within the Lightcone team. I think there is lots of stuff we could do better, and definitely comparing us to some ideal that I have in my head, I think things definitely aren’t going remotely as well as I would like them to, but I do feel like the word “dissatisfied” seems kind of wrong. I think there are individual comments that seem bad, but overall I think the conversations have been quite good, and I am mildly positively surprised by how well they have been going.
(As the author of the OP, I think my position is also consistent with “quite good, and mildly positively surprised.” I think the difference is counting up vs. counting down? I’m curious whether you think quite good when counting down from your personal vision of the ideal LessWrong.)
When counting down we are all savages dancing to the sun gods in a feeble attempt to change the course of history.
More seriously though, yeah, definitely when I count down, I see a ton of stuff that could be a lot better. A lot of important comments missing, not enough courage, not enough honesty, not enough vulnerability, not enough taking responsibility for the big picture.
The most obvious/annoying issue with karma is false disagreement zero equilibrium controversy tug of war that can’t currently be split into more specific senses of voting to reveal that actually there is a consensus.
This can’t be solved by pre-splitting, it has to act as needed, maybe co-opting the tagging system, with the default tag being “Boostworthy” (but not “Relevant” or anything specific like that), ability to see the tags if you click something, and ability to tag your vote with anything (one tag per voter, so to give a specific tag you have to untag “Boostworthy”, and all tags sum up into the usual karma score that is the only thing that shows by default until you click something). This has to be sufficiently inconvenient to only get used when necessary, but then somehow become convenient enough for everyone to use (for that specific comment).
On the other hand there is Steam that only has approve/disapprove votes and gives vastly more useful quality ratings than most rating aggregators that are even a little bit more nuanced. So any good idea is likely to make things worse. (Though Steam doesn’t have a zero equilibrium problem because the rating is the percentage of approve votes.)
Is it more important to see absolute or relative numbers of votes? To me it seems that if there are many votes, the relative numbers are more important: a comment with 45 upvotes and 55 downvotes is not too different from a comment with 55 upvotes and 45 downvotes; but one of them would be displayed as “-10 karma” and the other as “+10 karma” which seems different a lot.
On the other hand, with few votes, I would prefer to see “+1 karma” rather than “100% consensus” if in fact only 1 person has voted. It would be misleading to make a comment with 1 upvote and 0 downvotes seem more representative of the community consensus than a comment with 99 upvotes and 1 downvote.
How I perceive the current voting system, is that comments are somewhere on the “good—bad” scale, and the total karma is a result of “how many people think this is good vs bad” multiplied by “how many people saw this comment and bothered to vote”. So, “+50 karma” is not necessarily better than “+10 karma”, maybe just more visible; like a top-level comment made immediately after writing the article, versus an insightful comment made three days later as a reply to a reply to a reply to something.
But some people seem to have a strong opinion about the magnitude of the result, like “this comment is good, but not +20 good, only +5 good” or “this comment is stupid and deserves to have negative karma, but −15 is too low so I am going to upvote it to balance all those upvotes”—which drives me crazy, because it means that some people’s votes depend on whether they were among the early or late voters (the early voters expressing their honest opinion, the late voters mostly voting the opposite of their honest opinion just because they decided that too much agreement is a bad thing).
Here is my idea of a very simple visual representation that would reflect both the absolute and relative votes. Calculate three numbers: positive (the number of upvotes), neutral (the magical constant 7), and negative (the number of downvotes), then display a rectangle of fixed width and length, divided proportionally into green (positive), gray (neutral) and red (negative) parts.
So a comment with 1 upvote would have a mostly gray line with some green on the left, the comment with 2 upvotes would have almost 2× as much green… but the comments with 10 upvotes and 12 upvotes would seem quite similar to each other. A comment with 45 upvotes and 55 downvotes, or vice versa, would have a mostly half-green half-red line, so obviously controversial.
But some people seem to have a strong opinion about the magnitude of the result, like “this comment is good, but not +20 good, only +5 good” or “this comment is stupid and deserves to have negative karma, but −15 is too low so I am going to upvote it to balance all those upvotes”—which drives me crazy, because it means that some people’s votes depend on whether they were among the early or late voters (the early voters expressing their honest opinion, the late voters mostly voting the opposite of their honest opinion just because they decided that too much agreement is a bad thing).
I think this comes from a place of also seeing karma as reward/punishment, and thinking the reward/punishment is enough/too high, or from a place of seeing the score as representing where it should be relative to other comments, or just from trying to correct for underratedness/overratedness.
I sometimes do this, and think it’s alright with the current voting system, but I think it’s a flaw of the voting system that it creates this dynamic.
the early voters expressing their honest opinion, the late voters mostly voting the opposite of their honest opinion just because they decided that too much agreement is a bad thing
This is a misconstrual. The late voters are also expressing their honest opinion, it’s just that their honest opinion lies on a policy level rather than a raw stimulus-response level.
It’s at least as valid (and, I suspect, somewhat more valid) to have preferences of the form “this should be seen as somewhat better than that” than to have preferences of the form “I like this and dislike that.”
Here is my idea of a very simple visual representation that would reflect both the absolute and relative votes. Calculate three numbers: positive (the number of upvotes), neutral (the magical constant 7), and negative (the number of downvotes), then display a rectangle of fixed width and length, divided proportionally into green (positive), gray (neutral) and red (negative) parts.
So a comment with 1 upvote would have a mostly gray line with some green on the left, the comment with 2 upvotes would have almost 2× as much green… but the comments with 10 upvotes and 12 upvotes would seem quite similar to each other. A comment with 45 upvotes and 55 downvotes, or vice versa, would have a mostly half-green half-red line, so obviously controversial.
This is interesting and I would like to see a demo of it. The upside to this suggestion is that since it’s only a visual change and doesn’t actually change the way karma and voting works, it could get tested and reverted very easily, just needs to be built.
Interesting, this gave me an idea for something a bit different.
We’ll have a list of good attributes a comment can have (Rigor, Effort, Correctness/Accuracy/Precision, Funny, etc.). By default you would have one attribute (perhaps ‘Relevant’), and users will be able to add whichever attributes they want (perhaps even custom ones). These attributes will be voteable by users (no limit on how many you can vote on), and will show at the top of the comment together with their score (sorted by absolute value). I’m not sure how it would be used to sort comments or give points to users, though.
(I expect that having written this post + being friendly with much of the team will result in me being a part of some conversations on this in the near future; if there are summaries I can share here and otherwise it would be a long time before word got out, I’ll try to do so.)
I’m deeply surprised by this. If there is a consensus among the LW managers and community figures, could one of them write a post about it laying out what was dissatisfactory and what changes they feel need to be made, or at least the result they want from the changes? I know you’re a highly conscientious person with too much on zir hands already, so please don’t take this upon yourself.
I am also surprised by this! I think this sentence is kind of true, and am dissatisfied with the threads, but I don’t feel like my take is particularly well-summarized with the above language, at least in the context of this post (like, I feel like this sentence implies a particular type of agreement with the OP that I don’t think summarizes my current position very well, though I am also not totally confident I disagree with the OP).
I am in favor of experimenting more with some karma stuff, and have been encouraging people to work on that within the Lightcone team. I think there is lots of stuff we could do better, and definitely comparing us to some ideal that I have in my head, I think things definitely aren’t going remotely as well as I would like them to, but I do feel like the word “dissatisfied” seems kind of wrong. I think there are individual comments that seem bad, but overall I think the conversations have been quite good, and I am mildly positively surprised by how well they have been going.
(As the author of the OP, I think my position is also consistent with “quite good, and mildly positively surprised.” I think the difference is counting up vs. counting down? I’m curious whether you think quite good when counting down from your personal vision of the ideal LessWrong.)
When counting down we are all savages dancing to the sun gods in a feeble attempt to change the course of history.
More seriously though, yeah, definitely when I count down, I see a ton of stuff that could be a lot better. A lot of important comments missing, not enough courage, not enough honesty, not enough vulnerability, not enough taking responsibility for the big picture.
I did indeed mean “dissatisfied” in a “counting down” sense.
The most obvious/annoying issue with karma is false disagreement zero equilibrium controversy tug of war that can’t currently be split into more specific senses of voting to reveal that actually there is a consensus.
This can’t be solved by pre-splitting, it has to act as needed, maybe co-opting the tagging system, with the default tag being “Boostworthy” (but not “Relevant” or anything specific like that), ability to see the tags if you click something, and ability to tag your vote with anything (one tag per voter, so to give a specific tag you have to untag “Boostworthy”, and all tags sum up into the usual karma score that is the only thing that shows by default until you click something). This has to be sufficiently inconvenient to only get used when necessary, but then somehow become convenient enough for everyone to use (for that specific comment).
On the other hand there is Steam that only has approve/disapprove votes and gives vastly more useful quality ratings than most rating aggregators that are even a little bit more nuanced. So any good idea is likely to make things worse. (Though Steam doesn’t have a zero equilibrium problem because the rating is the percentage of approve votes.)
Is it more important to see absolute or relative numbers of votes? To me it seems that if there are many votes, the relative numbers are more important: a comment with 45 upvotes and 55 downvotes is not too different from a comment with 55 upvotes and 45 downvotes; but one of them would be displayed as “-10 karma” and the other as “+10 karma” which seems different a lot.
On the other hand, with few votes, I would prefer to see “+1 karma” rather than “100% consensus” if in fact only 1 person has voted. It would be misleading to make a comment with 1 upvote and 0 downvotes seem more representative of the community consensus than a comment with 99 upvotes and 1 downvote.
How I perceive the current voting system, is that comments are somewhere on the “good—bad” scale, and the total karma is a result of “how many people think this is good vs bad” multiplied by “how many people saw this comment and bothered to vote”. So, “+50 karma” is not necessarily better than “+10 karma”, maybe just more visible; like a top-level comment made immediately after writing the article, versus an insightful comment made three days later as a reply to a reply to a reply to something.
But some people seem to have a strong opinion about the magnitude of the result, like “this comment is good, but not +20 good, only +5 good” or “this comment is stupid and deserves to have negative karma, but −15 is too low so I am going to upvote it to balance all those upvotes”—which drives me crazy, because it means that some people’s votes depend on whether they were among the early or late voters (the early voters expressing their honest opinion, the late voters mostly voting the opposite of their honest opinion just because they decided that too much agreement is a bad thing).
Here is my idea of a very simple visual representation that would reflect both the absolute and relative votes. Calculate three numbers: positive (the number of upvotes), neutral (the magical constant 7), and negative (the number of downvotes), then display a rectangle of fixed width and length, divided proportionally into green (positive), gray (neutral) and red (negative) parts.
So a comment with 1 upvote would have a mostly gray line with some green on the left, the comment with 2 upvotes would have almost 2× as much green… but the comments with 10 upvotes and 12 upvotes would seem quite similar to each other. A comment with 45 upvotes and 55 downvotes, or vice versa, would have a mostly half-green half-red line, so obviously controversial.
I think this comes from a place of also seeing karma as reward/punishment, and thinking the reward/punishment is enough/too high, or from a place of seeing the score as representing where it should be relative to other comments, or just from trying to correct for underratedness/overratedness.
I sometimes do this, and think it’s alright with the current voting system, but I think it’s a flaw of the voting system that it creates this dynamic.
This is a misconstrual. The late voters are also expressing their honest opinion, it’s just that their honest opinion lies on a policy level rather than a raw stimulus-response level.
It’s at least as valid (and, I suspect, somewhat more valid) to have preferences of the form “this should be seen as somewhat better than that” than to have preferences of the form “I like this and dislike that.”
This is interesting and I would like to see a demo of it. The upside to this suggestion is that since it’s only a visual change and doesn’t actually change the way karma and voting works, it could get tested and reverted very easily, just needs to be built.
It could even be displayed to the right from the current karma display, so we could temporarily have both, like this:
Interesting, this gave me an idea for something a bit different.
We’ll have a list of good attributes a comment can have (Rigor, Effort, Correctness/Accuracy/Precision, Funny, etc.). By default you would have one attribute (perhaps ‘Relevant’), and users will be able to add whichever attributes they want (perhaps even custom ones). These attributes will be voteable by users (no limit on how many you can vote on), and will show at the top of the comment together with their score (sorted by absolute value). I’m not sure how it would be used to sort comments or give points to users, though.
(I expect that having written this post + being friendly with much of the team will result in me being a part of some conversations on this in the near future; if there are summaries I can share here and otherwise it would be a long time before word got out, I’ll try to do so.)