Voting is, of necessity, pleiotropically optimized. It loops into reward structures for author motivation, but it also regulates position within default reading suggestion hierarchies for readers seeking educational material, and it also potentially connects to a sense that the content is “agreed to” in some sort of tribal sense.
If someone says something very “important if true and maybe true” that’s one possible reason to push the content “UP into attention” rather than DOWN.
Another “attentional” reason might be if some content says “the first wrong idea that occurs to nearly everyone, which also has a high quality rebuttal cleanly and saliently attached to it”.
That is, upvotes can and maybe should flow certain places for reasons of active value-of-information and/or pedagogy. Probably there are other reasons, as well! 😉
A) As high-quality highly-upvoted rebuttals like Mr Kwa’s have arrived, I’ve personally been thinking that maybe I should reverse my initial downvote, which would make this jump even higher. I’m a very unusual voter, but I’ve explained my (tentative) theories of upvoting once or twice, and some people might have started to copy me.
B) I could imagine some voters were hoping (as I might if I thought about it some more and changed my mind on what my voting policy should be in very small ways) to somehow inspire some good rebuttals, by pre-emptively upvoting things in high VoI areas where LW simply hasn’t had much discussion lately?
C) An alternative explanation is of course that a lot of LW voters haven’t actually looked at nanotech very much, and don’t have good independent object level takes, and just agreed with the OP because they don’t know any better and it seemed plausible and well written. (This seems the most likely to me, fwiw.)
D) Another possibility is, of course, that there are a lot of object level agreement voters on LW and also all three of us are wrong about how nano could or would “really just work” if the best research directions got enough high-talent interest and supportive funding. I doubt this one… but it feels wise to include an anti-hubristic hypothesis when enumerating possibilities 😇
Voting is, of necessity, pleiotropically optimized. It loops into reward structures for author motivation, but it also regulates position within default reading suggestion hierarchies for readers seeking educational material, and it also potentially connects to a sense that the content is “agreed to” in some sort of tribal sense.
If someone says something very “important if true and maybe true” that’s one possible reason to push the content “UP into attention” rather than DOWN.
Another “attentional” reason might be if some content says “the first wrong idea that occurs to nearly everyone, which also has a high quality rebuttal cleanly and saliently attached to it”.
That is, upvotes can and maybe should flow certain places for reasons of active value-of-information and/or pedagogy. Probably there are other reasons, as well! 😉
A) As high-quality highly-upvoted rebuttals like Mr Kwa’s have arrived, I’ve personally been thinking that maybe I should reverse my initial downvote, which would make this jump even higher. I’m a very unusual voter, but I’ve explained my (tentative) theories of upvoting once or twice, and some people might have started to copy me.
B) I could imagine some voters were hoping (as I might if I thought about it some more and changed my mind on what my voting policy should be in very small ways) to somehow inspire some good rebuttals, by pre-emptively upvoting things in high VoI areas where LW simply hasn’t had much discussion lately?
C) An alternative explanation is of course that a lot of LW voters haven’t actually looked at nanotech very much, and don’t have good independent object level takes, and just agreed with the OP because they don’t know any better and it seemed plausible and well written. (This seems the most likely to me, fwiw.)
D) Another possibility is, of course, that there are a lot of object level agreement voters on LW and also all three of us are wrong about how nano could or would “really just work” if the best research directions got enough high-talent interest and supportive funding. I doubt this one… but it feels wise to include an anti-hubristic hypothesis when enumerating possibilities 😇