Change the mouseovers on the thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons from “Vote up”/”Vote down” to “More like this”/”Less like this”. I’ve suggested this before and it got upvotes, I suggest now it might be time to implement it.
Predicted outcome: within a couple of weeks, blue/green will have understood but undocumented positive/negative associations. Votes will be noisier, though, thanks mostly to confused newcomers and the occasional contrarian pursuing an idiosyncratic interpretation. Complaints about downvotes, and color politics jokes, will both become more common.
p = 0.7 contingent on implementation for core claim, .5-6 range for corollaries.
Proposed chaotic refinement: Blue/green, but switch them every 18 to 30 hours (randomly sampled, uniform distribution).
(ETA: Upon reflection days or weeks would be better, to increase chaos/noise ratio. Would also work better with prominent “top contributors for last 30 days” lists for both blue and green, and more adulation/condemnation based on those lists.)
Other refinements: each person is randomly permanently assigned either: blue/green OR they see blue/green but it’s actually green/blue behind the scenes. This makes any explicit discussion of blue/green more difficult.
Or: Each person actually has grue and bleen buttons. At some time t, they are suddenly voting for the other colours. An extended form of this looks similar to your ETA.
Am I an anti-liberal traditionalist? Humans are so silly. I have an idea. If you want to hit the right-wingers with something out of left field, try Rigorous Intuition, especially those posts over on the right under the heading “The Military-Occult Complex, ritual abuse/mind control, and ‘High Weirdness’”. I guarantee a few WTFs.
Heh, thanks. Probably won’t work on the local right-wing technocrats, however, as they are simply not interested in many such issues like the workings of the Bush regime or the military-industrial complex. I’m curious enough to take a look, though.
Edit: heh, that blog quotes Dick’s novels—already a good sign to me.
Availability heuristic; I haven’t read many conspiracy theorists. He struck me as more careful and more cogent than the few others I’d read; like, he bothers to explicitly bracket certain ideas as having a good chance of being wrong, and he emphasizes giving up on a thread if it doesn’t seem to be fruitful. He’s generally pragmatic. He also has a healthy skepticism about the motives and natures of claimed demonic/alien entities, not in the sense of categorically doubting that they’re supernatural/alien/”weird”, but in the sense of not assuming that just because they say they want to help humanity and so on that that is strong evidence of actual benevolence: “I find it a fascinating frustration that many of those convinced of a massive government cover-up fall over themselves to accept the words of non-human entities.” — this post on Fatima. Being pseudo-Catholic and schizotypal I naturally worry about demons—in fact that’s part of why I’m pseudo-Catholic and not, say, pseudo-Tibetan-Buddhist. So Jeff Wells scores a lot of points with me for his caution on that front.
Do you have recommendations for other conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorist debunkers? ’Cuz honestly I think Jeff Wells makes a compelling, coherent case for High Weirdness, which is worth keeping in mind as a live hypothesis, though I don’t think we’ll have the collaborative argumentation tools necessary to rationally assess the hypothesis for at least another five years.
I visited Fatima in 2007 with my family. It was...spooky...and in a way that the Vatican was not (that is to say, not in the same way as any old, massive, historically-important thing is). On the other hand, my Portuguese isn’t very good, so I may not have understood as much as I thought.
I clicked around a little on his site. Most of his conspiracy theories appear to be political and he’s clearly been mind-killed by politics.
As for evaluating “conspiracy theories”, I recommend you start by reading this blog post by Eric Raymond, also this comment by Konkvistador if you haven’t already seen it.
Sounds like you might not have read enough to see where his strengths and weaknesses are. Politics is his weakness and I mostly ignore that stuff, but I’m more interested in his paranormal stuff including the military-occult stuff, where he seems to have less of an ax to grind and sometimes presents a bunch of interesting source material without trying too hard to spin a story out of it. E.g. I like his report on Fatima, linked in my previous comment; what do you think of that one? (Though I suppose I should have told Multiheaded that Wells’ political stuff is bad and that his High Weirdness stuff is way better. Oh well.)
In my previous comment I for some reason conflated High Weirdness with conspiracy theory; in reality I suspect they’re not that connected. I’m more interested in High Weirdness than conspiracy, so any critiques of High Weirdness would be useful. I’m really unimpressed with standard “skeptic” arguments. Re conspiracy theories, Konkvistador and Raymond make the obvious points, I suppose there might be nothing more insightful to be said about the matter at that level of generality.
Though I suppose I should have told Multiheaded that Wells’ political stuff is bad and that his High Weirdness stuff is way better.
Nah, don’t worry. I understood from the start that politically that blog is something like the rants of a hippie Bircher. That is, with rather clouded judgment and some nonsense priors in the first place, but curious when it directs attention to odd facts that don’t fit the mainstream narrative. [1] Like the village idiot whose ravings contain clues to plot secrets in some computer RPGs.
(when I said “the Bush regime”, I didn’t mean all the standard left-of-center complaints about how he was evil, stupid and killed puppies—although I agree with the last two—but the genuinely irrational-looking stuff like the connections with fringe groups and the CIA’s rumoured odd activities)
P.S. Wow, that guy’s T-shirts are quite awfully designed.
P.P.S. And still it’s clearly worth reading, at least in matters which are somewhat above mere conspiracies and politics:
“If you draw the timelines,” said futurologist Ian Pearson, “realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it’s not a major career problem.” Pearson is sometimes credited with the invention of that fouler of distinction between home and office, text messaging. And given how all the futurist fantasies of increased leisure time have panned out, no one should take comfort in the prospect that death itself need not encumber job performance. Even though pensionable age and benefits continue to be rolled back vindictively, there was always at least the promise of the peace of the grave.
When it’s Hanson talking about the glorious future of Ems, the self-styled “rationalists”—I’m not talking about the LW majority, but the thinking patterns characteristic of some of the Overcoming Bias old guard—smile and nod. When it’s a somewhat disturbed and not overly logical guy warning sincerely about the looming Hell on Earth—factually, the same thing—they groan with annoyance at the pathetic Luddites and their mental disease known as “humanity”.
Obvious devil-worshipping “rationalist” cults like Objectiivism are only the tip of the iceberg here; we’re talking about some rather shocking spiritual and cultural erosion, handwaved as “non-neurotypicality” or “contrarianism” when it is at all acknowledged. (I’m not saying that there’s something horribly wrong with non-neurotypicality or contrarianism per se, as they are, but there’s nothing wrong with patriotism per se either, and you know who else was patriotic? [Godwin’s law])
By God, Will, I feel like I understand your concerns so much better now!
P.S. I know, I know, it’s kinda hypocritical of me to criticize a community member as morally corrupt after telling another guy to cut that shit out, but I can’t help it, I’m really spooked by this kind of people.
[1] Sorry, I missed this footnote when writing the comment, and now I forgot what it was. Silly me :(
Also, damn, it’s a bit of a jolt to encounter someone who thinks of the world’s course in the same Gnostic terms that I often entertain. I too have been associating the spectre of anti-religious, anti-ideological, technocratic tyranny that’s haunting us with the supposed iron “logic”, runaway reductionism and blind hubris of the Archons, as relayed by the ancients and by latter-day SF visionaries like Dick.
(All aboard! We’re off for −10 rating in 3… 2… 1...)
I think this would discourage me from writing contrary stuff. Right now if I get voted down, I explain it to myself as me having an unpopular but possibly correct opinion. Hearing that people want “less like this” seems harsh somehow.
This is the pro-airbrushing argument; airbrushing in magazines decreases body neurosis because it gives girls plausible deniability for why they don’t look like models.
I saw this not to pass judgement either way on your argument.
Does airbrushing actually work to decrease body neurosis? My impression is that it doesn’t. However, mannikins seem to cause less damage, possibly because they’re less realisitic looking.
Please, no. As far as I’m concerned, an upvote or downvote, by me or on my posts, is not a reward or a punishment. Not even slightly.
I think you’re wrong there. Humans are exquisitely sensitive to status, anywhere they see anything that looks even slightly like it. Upvotes/downvotes are precisely rewards/punishments, whatever else they may be or whatever you may intend yours to be.
“as they please” is, I think, wrong too. It’s incredibly difficult to switch off awareness of status. Particularly with your score on the LessWrong video game right up there at the top-right in a little green oval, with your this-month score just below it.
“as they please” seems dismissive of how difficult it is. It’s that basic to human nature, not just human thinking.
Of course, you may be able to lessen how much you care about your score on the LessWrong game to the point where it doesn’t affect you more than epsilon, but assuming you’re a human I would be very surprised to find you literally didn’t have even the faintest twinge.
“Difficult” too easily becomes an excuse for not doing the work. How “difficult” is it to get a university degree? How “difficult” is it to bike 100 miles?
Sometimes “difficult” just means “I don’t want to”.
So I see I’m currently at −3 for my two comments above, which I think may be the first time I have ever commented on the votes on my own posts. My reaction: so what? I am sufficiently self-assured (a virtue worth cultivating, and observing one’s reaction to one’s karma score is one small way of cultivating it) that I draw from it neither validation nor shame, and besides, a trifling few points here and there are nothing. Comments are a more substantial currency.
You should call it black and white. Because that’s what it is, black and white thinking.
Just think about it : using nothing more than one bit of non normalized information by compressing the opinion of people who use wildly variable judgement criteria, from variable populations (different people care and vote for different topics).
Then you’re going to tell me it “works nonetheless”, that it self-corrects because several (how many do you really need to obtain such a self-correction effect?) people are aggregating their opinions and that people usually mean it to say “more / less of this please”. But what’s your evidence for it working? The quality of the discussion here? How much of that stems from the quality of the public, and the quality of the base material such as Eliezer’s sequence?
Do you realize that judgements like “more / less of this” may well optimize less than you think for content, insight, or epistemic hygiene, and more than it should for stuff that just amuses and pleases people? Jokes, famous quotes, group-think, ego grooming, etc.
People optimizing for “more like this” eventually downgrades content into lolcats and porn. It’s crude wireheading. I’m not saying this community isn’t somewhat above going that deep, but we’re still human beings and therefore still susceptible to it.
I’ve noticed that humor gets a lot of upvotes compared to good but non-funny comments. However, humor hasn’t taken over, probably because being funny can take some thought.
I don’t think karma conveys a lot of information at this point, though heavily upvoted articles tend to be good, and I’ve given up on reading down-voted articles, with a possible exception of those that get a significant number of comments.
People optimizing for “more like this” eventually downgrades content into lolcats and porn.
More so than “vote up”? You’ve made a statement here that looks like it should be supported by evidence. What sites do you know of this happening from going from “vote up” to “more of this”?
In this case I don’t think both are significantly different. They both don’t convey a lot of information, both are very noisy, and a lot of people seem to already mean “more like this” when they “vote up” anyway.
I don’t think it was clear from the context that you were arguing against the practice of community moderation in general. I also don’t think you supported your case anywhere near well enough to justify your verbal vehemence. Was this a test/demonstration of Wei Dai’s point about intolerance of overconfident newcomers with different ideas?
Actually, not against. I was thinking that current moderation techniques on lesswrong are inadequate/insufficient. I don’t think the reddit karma system’s been optimized much. We just imported it. I’m sure we can adapt it and do better.
At least part of my point should have been that moderation should provide richer information. For instance by allowing for graded scores on a scale from −10 to 10, and showing the average score rather than the sum of all votes. Also, giving some clue as to how controversial a post is. That’d not be a silver bullet, but it’d at least be more informative I think.
And yes, I was also arguing this idea thinking it would fit nicely in this post.
I guess I was wrong since it seems it wasn’t clear at all what I was arguing for, and being tactless wasn’t a good idea either, contrarian intolerance context or not. Regardless, arguing it in detail in comments, while off-topic in this post, wasn’t the way to do it either.
Karma graphs would give a lot of information—whether a person’s average karma is trending up or down, and whether their average karma is the result of a lot of similar karma or +/- swings.
True, except you don’t know how many people didn’t vote (i.e. we don’t keep track of that : a comment at 0 could as well have been read and voted as “0” by 0, 1, 10 or a hundred people and is the default state anyway.)(We similarly can’t know if a comment is controversial, that is, how many upvotes and downvotes went into the aggregated score).
The system does keep track of how everyone voted, though; it needs to do that in order to render the thumbs up/down buttons as green or gray. wedrifid is right though; using suitable compression, you might be able to get away with less than two bits (in aggregate).
Change the mouseovers on the thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons from “Vote up”/”Vote down” to “More like this”/”Less like this”. I’ve suggested this before and it got upvotes, I suggest now it might be time to implement it.
Stupid alternative: Instead of up/down, have blue/green. Let chaos reign as people arbitrarily assign meaning.
Classic Will_Newsome. Greenvoted.
BLUE!!
… well, it said blue when I clicked on it …
Predicted outcome: within a couple of weeks, blue/green will have understood but undocumented positive/negative associations. Votes will be noisier, though, thanks mostly to confused newcomers and the occasional contrarian pursuing an idiosyncratic interpretation. Complaints about downvotes, and color politics jokes, will both become more common.
p = 0.7 contingent on implementation for core claim, .5-6 range for corollaries.
0.7 strikes me as low.
Proposed chaotic refinement: Blue/green, but switch them every 18 to 30 hours (randomly sampled, uniform distribution).
(ETA: Upon reflection days or weeks would be better, to increase chaos/noise ratio. Would also work better with prominent “top contributors for last 30 days” lists for both blue and green, and more adulation/condemnation based on those lists.)
Other refinements: each person is randomly permanently assigned either: blue/green OR they see blue/green but it’s actually green/blue behind the scenes. This makes any explicit discussion of blue/green more difficult.
Or: Each person actually has grue and bleen buttons. At some time t, they are suddenly voting for the other colours. An extended form of this looks similar to your ETA.
And you call yourself an anti-liberal traditionalist? :)
Am I an anti-liberal traditionalist? Humans are so silly. I have an idea. If you want to hit the right-wingers with something out of left field, try Rigorous Intuition, especially those posts over on the right under the heading “The Military-Occult Complex, ritual abuse/mind control, and ‘High Weirdness’”. I guarantee a few WTFs.
Heh, thanks. Probably won’t work on the local right-wing technocrats, however, as they are simply not interested in many such issues like the workings of the Bush regime or the military-industrial complex. I’m curious enough to take a look, though.
Edit: heh, that blog quotes Dick’s novels—already a good sign to me.
I’m curious why you picked this conspiracy theorist in particular.
Availability heuristic; I haven’t read many conspiracy theorists. He struck me as more careful and more cogent than the few others I’d read; like, he bothers to explicitly bracket certain ideas as having a good chance of being wrong, and he emphasizes giving up on a thread if it doesn’t seem to be fruitful. He’s generally pragmatic. He also has a healthy skepticism about the motives and natures of claimed demonic/alien entities, not in the sense of categorically doubting that they’re supernatural/alien/”weird”, but in the sense of not assuming that just because they say they want to help humanity and so on that that is strong evidence of actual benevolence: “I find it a fascinating frustration that many of those convinced of a massive government cover-up fall over themselves to accept the words of non-human entities.” — this post on Fatima. Being pseudo-Catholic and schizotypal I naturally worry about demons—in fact that’s part of why I’m pseudo-Catholic and not, say, pseudo-Tibetan-Buddhist. So Jeff Wells scores a lot of points with me for his caution on that front.
Do you have recommendations for other conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorist debunkers? ’Cuz honestly I think Jeff Wells makes a compelling, coherent case for High Weirdness, which is worth keeping in mind as a live hypothesis, though I don’t think we’ll have the collaborative argumentation tools necessary to rationally assess the hypothesis for at least another five years.
I visited Fatima in 2007 with my family. It was...spooky...and in a way that the Vatican was not (that is to say, not in the same way as any old, massive, historically-important thing is). On the other hand, my Portuguese isn’t very good, so I may not have understood as much as I thought.
I clicked around a little on his site. Most of his conspiracy theories appear to be political and he’s clearly been mind-killed by politics.
As for evaluating “conspiracy theories”, I recommend you start by reading this blog post by Eric Raymond, also this comment by Konkvistador if you haven’t already seen it.
Sounds like you might not have read enough to see where his strengths and weaknesses are. Politics is his weakness and I mostly ignore that stuff, but I’m more interested in his paranormal stuff including the military-occult stuff, where he seems to have less of an ax to grind and sometimes presents a bunch of interesting source material without trying too hard to spin a story out of it. E.g. I like his report on Fatima, linked in my previous comment; what do you think of that one? (Though I suppose I should have told Multiheaded that Wells’ political stuff is bad and that his High Weirdness stuff is way better. Oh well.)
In my previous comment I for some reason conflated High Weirdness with conspiracy theory; in reality I suspect they’re not that connected. I’m more interested in High Weirdness than conspiracy, so any critiques of High Weirdness would be useful. I’m really unimpressed with standard “skeptic” arguments. Re conspiracy theories, Konkvistador and Raymond make the obvious points, I suppose there might be nothing more insightful to be said about the matter at that level of generality.
Nah, don’t worry. I understood from the start that politically that blog is something like the rants of a hippie Bircher. That is, with rather clouded judgment and some nonsense priors in the first place, but curious when it directs attention to odd facts that don’t fit the mainstream narrative. [1] Like the village idiot whose ravings contain clues to plot secrets in some computer RPGs.
(when I said “the Bush regime”, I didn’t mean all the standard left-of-center complaints about how he was evil, stupid and killed puppies—although I agree with the last two—but the genuinely irrational-looking stuff like the connections with fringe groups and the CIA’s rumoured odd activities)
P.S. Wow, that guy’s T-shirts are quite awfully designed.
P.P.S. And still it’s clearly worth reading, at least in matters which are somewhat above mere conspiracies and politics:
When it’s Hanson talking about the glorious future of Ems, the self-styled “rationalists”—I’m not talking about the LW majority, but the thinking patterns characteristic of some of the Overcoming Bias old guard—smile and nod. When it’s a somewhat disturbed and not overly logical guy warning sincerely about the looming Hell on Earth—factually, the same thing—they groan with annoyance at the pathetic Luddites and their mental disease known as “humanity”.
Obvious devil-worshipping “rationalist” cults like Objectiivism are only the tip of the iceberg here; we’re talking about some rather shocking spiritual and cultural erosion, handwaved as “non-neurotypicality” or “contrarianism” when it is at all acknowledged. (I’m not saying that there’s something horribly wrong with non-neurotypicality or contrarianism per se, as they are, but there’s nothing wrong with patriotism per se either, and you know who else was patriotic? [Godwin’s law])
By God, Will, I feel like I understand your concerns so much better now!
P.S. I know, I know, it’s kinda hypocritical of me to criticize a community member as morally corrupt after telling another guy to cut that shit out, but I can’t help it, I’m really spooked by this kind of people.
[1] Sorry, I missed this footnote when writing the comment, and now I forgot what it was. Silly me :(
Also, damn, it’s a bit of a jolt to encounter someone who thinks of the world’s course in the same Gnostic terms that I often entertain. I too have been associating the spectre of anti-religious, anti-ideological, technocratic tyranny that’s haunting us with the supposed iron “logic”, runaway reductionism and blind hubris of the Archons, as relayed by the ancients and by latter-day SF visionaries like Dick.
(All aboard! We’re off for −10 rating in 3… 2… 1...)
Given how deeply this comment is buried in an old thread I’d be surprised if 10 people even read it.
Oh, don’t worry, dude, you can simply make nine or so new accounts to make up for it. ;)
Sort by greenest.
I think of it as “Pay more attention to this” / “Pay less attention to this.” Communicating primarily to other readers rather than to posters.
I think this would discourage me from writing contrary stuff. Right now if I get voted down, I explain it to myself as me having an unpopular but possibly correct opinion. Hearing that people want “less like this” seems harsh somehow.
This is the pro-airbrushing argument; airbrushing in magazines decreases body neurosis because it gives girls plausible deniability for why they don’t look like models.
I saw this not to pass judgement either way on your argument.
Does airbrushing actually work to decrease body neurosis? My impression is that it doesn’t. However, mannikins seem to cause less damage, possibly because they’re less realisitic looking.
Isn’t that the point? A stimuli that is insufficiently strong to change behavior is pointless to use for behavior modification.
Frankly I think we should reconsider the early suggestion that karma on comments should be between
0and1, starting at0.5.1 and 999. No doubt someone will write a script to render the number in decibels …
Hmm. Or “Reward”/”Punish”? “Incent”/”Disincent”? “Carrot”/”Stick”?
“I like your comment, so I more like thissed it” doesn’t roll off the tongue.
I want to go around carroting things.
All I could think of was this. (deep link, ten seconds long).
(Warning: Homestuck fandom, implausibly unsafe for work, unless your boss is into Homestuck.)
Please, no. As far as I’m concerned, an upvote or downvote, by me or on my posts, is not a reward or a punishment. Not even slightly.
So much the better. I am not interested in who has upvoted or downvoted me, and I never mention my own votes.
I think you’re wrong there. Humans are exquisitely sensitive to status, anywhere they see anything that looks even slightly like it. Upvotes/downvotes are precisely rewards/punishments, whatever else they may be or whatever you may intend yours to be.
Other people can torture themselves with such phantoms or not, as they please.
“as they please” is, I think, wrong too. It’s incredibly difficult to switch off awareness of status. Particularly with your score on the LessWrong video game right up there at the top-right in a little green oval, with your this-month score just below it.
I’m not talking about how easy or difficult it is.
“as they please” seems dismissive of how difficult it is. It’s that basic to human nature, not just human thinking.
Of course, you may be able to lessen how much you care about your score on the LessWrong game to the point where it doesn’t affect you more than epsilon, but assuming you’re a human I would be very surprised to find you literally didn’t have even the faintest twinge.
“Difficult” too easily becomes an excuse for not doing the work. How “difficult” is it to get a university degree? How “difficult” is it to bike 100 miles?
Sometimes “difficult” just means “I don’t want to”.
So I see I’m currently at −3 for my two comments above, which I think may be the first time I have ever commented on the votes on my own posts. My reaction: so what? I am sufficiently self-assured (a virtue worth cultivating, and observing one’s reaction to one’s karma score is one small way of cultivating it) that I draw from it neither validation nor shame, and besides, a trifling few points here and there are nothing. Comments are a more substantial currency.
The dogs bark. The caravan moves on.
Also relevant.
I agree that reward/punish doesn’t quite capture the intended meaning. The other suggestions I edited in also have that problem.
Even if we’re not mentioning votes, there are various other reasons why we might want to talk about the process of voting.
I kind of like “I like your comment, so I morepleased it”.
“Appreciated this” / “Pearl wasted on me” ?
“Bouquet”/”Brickbat”.
This is a seriously fucking awesome suggestion! Do it!
You should call it black and white. Because that’s what it is, black and white thinking.
Just think about it : using nothing more than one bit of non normalized information by compressing the opinion of people who use wildly variable judgement criteria, from variable populations (different people care and vote for different topics).
Then you’re going to tell me it “works nonetheless”, that it self-corrects because several (how many do you really need to obtain such a self-correction effect?) people are aggregating their opinions and that people usually mean it to say “more / less of this please”. But what’s your evidence for it working? The quality of the discussion here? How much of that stems from the quality of the public, and the quality of the base material such as Eliezer’s sequence?
Do you realize that judgements like “more / less of this” may well optimize less than you think for content, insight, or epistemic hygiene, and more than it should for stuff that just amuses and pleases people? Jokes, famous quotes, group-think, ego grooming, etc.
People optimizing for “more like this” eventually downgrades content into lolcats and porn. It’s crude wireheading. I’m not saying this community isn’t somewhat above going that deep, but we’re still human beings and therefore still susceptible to it.
I’ve noticed that humor gets a lot of upvotes compared to good but non-funny comments. However, humor hasn’t taken over, probably because being funny can take some thought.
I don’t think karma conveys a lot of information at this point, though heavily upvoted articles tend to be good, and I’ve given up on reading down-voted articles, with a possible exception of those that get a significant number of comments.
More so than “vote up”? You’ve made a statement here that looks like it should be supported by evidence. What sites do you know of this happening from going from “vote up” to “more of this”?
Not more so than “vote up”.
In this case I don’t think both are significantly different. They both don’t convey a lot of information, both are very noisy, and a lot of people seem to already mean “more like this” when they “vote up” anyway.
I don’t think it was clear from the context that you were arguing against the practice of community moderation in general. I also don’t think you supported your case anywhere near well enough to justify your verbal vehemence. Was this a test/demonstration of Wei Dai’s point about intolerance of overconfident newcomers with different ideas?
Actually, not against. I was thinking that current moderation techniques on lesswrong are inadequate/insufficient. I don’t think the reddit karma system’s been optimized much. We just imported it. I’m sure we can adapt it and do better.
At least part of my point should have been that moderation should provide richer information. For instance by allowing for graded scores on a scale from −10 to 10, and showing the average score rather than the sum of all votes. Also, giving some clue as to how controversial a post is. That’d not be a silver bullet, but it’d at least be more informative I think.
And yes, I was also arguing this idea thinking it would fit nicely in this post.
I guess I was wrong since it seems it wasn’t clear at all what I was arguing for, and being tactless wasn’t a good idea either, contrarian intolerance context or not. Regardless, arguing it in detail in comments, while off-topic in this post, wasn’t the way to do it either.
Karma graphs would give a lot of information—whether a person’s average karma is trending up or down, and whether their average karma is the result of a lot of similar karma or +/- swings.
Don’t you technically need at least two bits ? There are three states: “downvoted”, “upvoted”, and “not voted at all”.
One and a half if you can find a suitable compression algorithm. I wouldn’t rule that out as a possibility but it may be counter-intuitive.
True, except you don’t know how many people didn’t vote (i.e. we don’t keep track of that : a comment at 0 could as well have been read and voted as “0” by 0, 1, 10 or a hundred people and is the default state anyway.)(We similarly can’t know if a comment is controversial, that is, how many upvotes and downvotes went into the aggregated score).
The system does keep track of how everyone voted, though; it needs to do that in order to render the thumbs up/down buttons as green or gray. wedrifid is right though; using suitable compression, you might be able to get away with less than two bits (in aggregate).