Since I didn’t see it mentioned in the post, I’ll reiterate my concern that if AI stuff is not considered separately from non-AI stuff, then votes on AI stuff might swamp everything else:
For clarity, are the review & post results going to be separated into AI and non-AI stuff again, like they IIRC were in some previous year?
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Overall my attitude is like, if the top 7 posts are all AI posts, that’s not because they’re necessarily better than the best non-AI posts, but rather because AI has been The Topic since 2022, plus the readership has dramatically shifted towards AI content. At which point we might as well declare LW to be a full-time AI site and consider all the rest to be mere hobbyist content =(. Such a ranking outcome would disincentivize authors from writing about the latter. Better to split the ranking into two top-25s or something.
Also, if the rankings are not split up, then if one only visits LW for AI or non-AI content, that gives an annoying strategic incentive to review-downvote all the other content. That doesn’t occur if the rankings are separate.
To elaborate on that last point: Due to how quadratic voting works, if you want to maximize the effect of your votes on the relative rankings of a lot of posts (rather than for a few posts in particular), then the optimal voting pattern is to upvote all posts of the category you like +1, and downvote all posts of the disliked category by −1. (Net effect: a delta of +2 vote review karma on 250 posts of one’s choosing.) Two natural candidates for this are AI vs. non-AI stuff. But if these categories are ranked separately, then the incentive for strategic voting disappears.
And besides the strategic voting stuff, another issue is that much of the AI stuff is very technical, so I often feel like I can’t make an informed vote one way or another.
We’ll probably continue separating AI stuff from non-AI stuff within the top 50 when we present the context to readers. If the majority of top 50 stuff is all AI, then we might also look further down the list for non-AI posts, though I want to avoid skewing the results of the votes too much (so very likely wouldn’t go down more than to place 75 or so).
No firm decisions made yet, but I think it’s fairly likely that we’ll do an AI and non-AI separation. If, for example, 40 of the top posts were AI, I think we would very likely do a top-25 non-AI posts or something like that.
Thanks for doing this event every year!
Since I didn’t see it mentioned in the post, I’ll reiterate my concern that if AI stuff is not considered separately from non-AI stuff, then votes on AI stuff might swamp everything else:
To elaborate on that last point: Due to how quadratic voting works, if you want to maximize the effect of your votes on the relative rankings of a lot of posts (rather than for a few posts in particular), then the optimal voting pattern is to upvote all posts of the category you like +1, and downvote all posts of the disliked category by −1. (Net effect: a delta of +2 vote review karma on 250 posts of one’s choosing.) Two natural candidates for this are AI vs. non-AI stuff. But if these categories are ranked separately, then the incentive for strategic voting disappears.
And besides the strategic voting stuff, another issue is that much of the AI stuff is very technical, so I often feel like I can’t make an informed vote one way or another.
We’ll probably continue separating AI stuff from non-AI stuff within the top 50 when we present the context to readers. If the majority of top 50 stuff is all AI, then we might also look further down the list for non-AI posts, though I want to avoid skewing the results of the votes too much (so very likely wouldn’t go down more than to place 75 or so).
No firm decisions made yet, but I think it’s fairly likely that we’ll do an AI and non-AI separation. If, for example, 40 of the top posts were AI, I think we would very likely do a top-25 non-AI posts or something like that.