I note that your top level posting priviledges have already been (automatically) removed due to the karma hit from votes thus far and I expect this negative score to remain so for some time as this post is downvoted to oblivion. Please do not make posts like this here.
It seems on topic to me; Rolf is responding to a previous post that claimed that rationality shows us something about world events. Rolf is disputing the claim.
I haven’t followed the Amanda Knox case at all, or even its discussion on LW, but I’m interested now in the outcome because it bears on how much we can trust priors over court rooms, and on how good the LW community’s previous judgment was.
(Rolf, though, maybe you could spell out something of its rationality relevance in your opening few lines? I know this from private discussion with you, only.)
I haven’t followed the Amanda Knox case at all, or even its discussion on LW, but I’m interested now in the outcome because it bears on how much we can trust priors over court rooms, and on how good the LW community’s previous judgment was.
In that case, I highly recommend going through the posts and comments already devoted to this topic. The original survey post and the follow-up Amanda Knox test go into great detail about this case. Of particular interest should be the comments in the survey post, where members stated their estimates of the defendants’ guilt.
If lots of people aren’t interested in reading it, as reflected in karma scores, then you should find somewhere to post it where people do want to read it.
Ah, but we know from the general pattern of votes (both for posts and for comments) that a certain subset of people on this forum do want to read posts and comments implying Knox is innocent, but do not want to read posts and comments implying Knox is guilty.
By your logic, does that mean you’re advocating that only people who believe Knox is innocent should post, and that people who believe Knox is guilty should not post?
If that’s the only explanation you can think of for the pattern of voting you see, you’re not ready to post here. Remember, few here give a damn about the case one way or the other, except as an example for training our brains.
EDIT: since you’re an SIAI donor, I’ll cut you a little more slack than I did here, as per Wei Dai’s comment.
EDIT: since you’re an SIAI donor, I’ll cut you a little more slack than I did here, as per Wei Dai’s comment.
Vote reversed. This is a discussion forum, not a prediction market. The latter is the information processing mechanism for which a financial contribution can be expected to increase the quality of outcomes irrespective of bias.
I’m missing something in your argument. I’m saying that now that I know that Rolf has a demonstrated, concrete commitment to caring about the core issues of this site, I’ll treat him differently than when I thought he was just some guy obsessed with the Kercher thing. You think I’m making a mistake? Could you help me see it?
I suspect I am not giving you enough slack while executing my “discourage pollution of lesswrong discussions with external status games” policy. Since you were initially saying things like ‘not ready to contribute here’ and this was based partly on the assumption that Rolf was just Kercher obsessed finding out who Rolf is does actually have relevance.
I’m going to do half a reversal and go to ‘no vote’. Only half because while Rolf isn’t ‘just’ a Kercher obsessed guy he is still a Kercher obsessed guy for the purposes of his contribution here. Knowing he is also in tune with existential risk issues and related issues in general does make a difference but not that much. (In fact, right or wrong I actually kind of expect better from someone with that kind of status.)
Well, there’s donor and there’s donor… and when someone can have a reasonable claim to having helped build this very site with money rather than words and is currently sponsoring matching donations, it doesn’t hurt for us to be a little nicer than we would to some random person that got downvoted below zero karma.
Btw, some self-doubt for you, I’m not positing that this is entirely rational, just that it doesn’t hurt.
Try to look at the current voting pattern on the comments to “Amanda Knox Test” and tell me there’s not a correlation between favoring Knox’s innocence and getting upvoted. (Don’t forget to load all the comments so you see the people who are negative despite making reasoned comments about the case.)
All sorts. For example, if I rate someone highly and they write something that at first glance seems to be obviously wrong, I’m more likely to put time into seeing if I’ve missed something.
You also haven’t cared to make any contribution on the topic of rationality. The karma system serves to prevent new posters posting Mind KillingAdvocacy. I do not understand why that process did not work in this instance. I count few posts of yours that have not been either in the Knox thread or dragging the Knox issue to other parts of the site by criticizing Komponisto. The system, if working as advertised, would not have allowed this post.
If your thesis is that debunking the content of a featured post in this forum, is not on-topic for this forum, then I personally disagree. If someone posts false information as a featured post, then I personally would prefer to be informed that it is false rather than continue believing false information. There are probably other readers who feel the same, and I hope this post provided such a service to them.
If your thesis is that debunking the content of a featured post in this forum, is not on-topic for this forum
It is not. I take Vive’s thesis as granted and assume it is obvious to most readers. My own contention is that this post should not have been made and should not have been able to be posted by a user with no karma.
Rolf, even if you don’t care about karma, it might be good practice to keep LW visibly about rationality, and so to briefly recap the relevance of this post to LW and rationality (via its history with komposito’s post), rather than have it appear that Amanda Knox or other current events are interesting here in their own right.
If you post here more often, you’ll learn that certain linguistic patterns are required for the community to not get annoyed at you when making strong-sounding conclusions. Try not to take it too seriously.
One regular poster here is a current theist. He has a lot of karma because he surrounds many of his statements in self-doubt.
I completely agree with you that surrounding my statements with self-doubt would have increased my karma.
However, I do not agree that this is a sufficient reason to surround my statements with self-doubt. As I said, I don’t care about karma.
I do care about things that often correlate with karma, such as accuracy and insight. If there is evidence that surrounding these statements with self-doubt will increase my accuracy, I will do it. Therefore, I look forward to any evidence proffered that my claim C1 is incorrect (such as an argument that one of komponisto’s four statements I’ve charged to be misleading is, in fact, correct). So far, I have not heard any such evidence in this thread.
If you post here more often, you’ll learn that certain linguistic patterns are required for the community to not get annoyed at you when making strong-sounding conclusions.
For example, “:s/Knox//g” helps.
More seriously, that phenomenon extends far beyond LessWrong and applies particularly when the comments are personal (or reflect on an individual fairly directly).
Again, empirically, “:s/Knox is guilty/Knox is innocent/g” helps even more.
Unless people think that “voting up comments you agree with and voting down things you disagree with” only happens on other sites, in which case I’m curious by what mechanism you think this is enforced on this site.
It’d help if you picked a group belief that’s actually demonstrably wrong to illustrate this, but you picked a hella wrong target this time around. Did you read through ~700 or so comments on the other Knox posts, or only the original posts?
The dynamic you mention is certainly present (and, there is some benefit to allowing disagreement at least a partial influence on votes). Unfortunately, in this instance it is hard to distinguish simple disagreement from disapproval of bad arguments and prvalent logical rudeness. The same people who disagree with Knox being guilty are people who object to the type of reasoning used to support this contention. That’s part of how they became convinced of her innocence in the first place.
In that case my previous comment doesn’t apply to you, but I don’t withdraw it in general, because I have certainly seen other people object to posts as unsuitable, when it is clear that in fact their real reason is that they disagree with the content of the post.
I value your opinion. Please downvote komponisto’s post as well then (if you haven’t already) if you want to be consistent, as it’s (as of this writing) at +30.
I believe already have, primarily because it encouraged an influx of posters only interested in political advocacy of one kind of another. It significantly lowered the quality of conversation for some time.. I did, however, upvote Komponisto’s earlier survey style post, which was an excellent exercise in rationality.
I believe already have [downvoted “The Amanda Knox Test”], primarily because it encouraged an influx of posters only interested in political advocacy of one kind of another.
That is a shame. You indicated at the time that you enjoyed my post; it doesn’t seem right to downvote a post that meets the internal standards of LW simply because of the traffic it brings in. Yes, there were some low-quality comments, but they were downvoted to invisibility—just like it’s supposed to work. Meanwhile, we also managed to host what was and probably remains the highest-quality discussion of that particular controversial hot-topic on any Internet forum.
It may also be worth considering the new (legitimate) readers we may have picked up as a result of a post that received greater-than-usual outside exposure.
Finally, I don’t think we should go back and downvote old posts that we liked to be “fair” to recent posts that we don’t, just because they’re on the same topic. That seems silly.
I am convinced, on all counts and have reverted the change. In the context your post warranted a positive reception. On the other hand I do think new posts now made on other similar issues of contention are something to be wary of encouraging and I have little doubt that I’ll downvote similar posts in the future.
At the level of self awareness I notice my ethical instincts being pushed away from my usual consequentialist leanings and towards deontological thinking when engaged personally and in a positive manner. This seems to be a typical response and I know that I experience the reverse change strongly when met with aggressive or socially presumptive engagement.. Interesting.
People say things like this here something like ten to a hundred times more frequently than they do anywhere else I have ever frequented.
My hunch is that thinking style combined years of frustration at intellectual discourse being ruined by status considerations play a strong part there in many cases.
Sounds reasonable. I wonder if there should be more survey style posts then, but on topics that will have verifiable outcomes. For example, one could pick out a topic from one of the prediction markets and discuss that. This would have the advantage that, at the end of the day, if someone come to the wrong conclusion, they would eventually realize they came to the wrong conclusion and have an opportunity to learn something from the exercise.
This isn’t what this site is here for.
I note that your top level posting priviledges have already been (automatically) removed due to the karma hit from votes thus far and I expect this negative score to remain so for some time as this post is downvoted to oblivion. Please do not make posts like this here.
It seems on topic to me; Rolf is responding to a previous post that claimed that rationality shows us something about world events. Rolf is disputing the claim.
I haven’t followed the Amanda Knox case at all, or even its discussion on LW, but I’m interested now in the outcome because it bears on how much we can trust priors over court rooms, and on how good the LW community’s previous judgment was.
(Rolf, though, maybe you could spell out something of its rationality relevance in your opening few lines? I know this from private discussion with you, only.)
In that case, I highly recommend going through the posts and comments already devoted to this topic. The original survey post and the follow-up Amanda Knox test go into great detail about this case. Of particular interest should be the comments in the survey post, where members stated their estimates of the defendants’ guilt.
I don’t really care about karma. If someone isn’t interested in reading about it, then they shouldn’t read it.
If lots of people aren’t interested in reading it, as reflected in karma scores, then you should find somewhere to post it where people do want to read it.
Ah, but we know from the general pattern of votes (both for posts and for comments) that a certain subset of people on this forum do want to read posts and comments implying Knox is innocent, but do not want to read posts and comments implying Knox is guilty.
By your logic, does that mean you’re advocating that only people who believe Knox is innocent should post, and that people who believe Knox is guilty should not post?
If that’s the only explanation you can think of for the pattern of voting you see, you’re not ready to post here. Remember, few here give a damn about the case one way or the other, except as an example for training our brains.
EDIT: since you’re an SIAI donor, I’ll cut you a little more slack than I did here, as per Wei Dai’s comment.
Vote reversed. This is a discussion forum, not a prediction market. The latter is the information processing mechanism for which a financial contribution can be expected to increase the quality of outcomes irrespective of bias.
I’m missing something in your argument. I’m saying that now that I know that Rolf has a demonstrated, concrete commitment to caring about the core issues of this site, I’ll treat him differently than when I thought he was just some guy obsessed with the Kercher thing. You think I’m making a mistake? Could you help me see it?
I suspect I am not giving you enough slack while executing my “discourage pollution of lesswrong discussions with external status games” policy. Since you were initially saying things like ‘not ready to contribute here’ and this was based partly on the assumption that Rolf was just Kercher obsessed finding out who Rolf is does actually have relevance.
I’m going to do half a reversal and go to ‘no vote’. Only half because while Rolf isn’t ‘just’ a Kercher obsessed guy he is still a Kercher obsessed guy for the purposes of his contribution here. Knowing he is also in tune with existential risk issues and related issues in general does make a difference but not that much. (In fact, right or wrong I actually kind of expect better from someone with that kind of status.)
Well, there’s donor and there’s donor… and when someone can have a reasonable claim to having helped build this very site with money rather than words and is currently sponsoring matching donations, it doesn’t hurt for us to be a little nicer than we would to some random person that got downvoted below zero karma.
Btw, some self-doubt for you, I’m not positing that this is entirely rational, just that it doesn’t hurt.
Try to look at the current voting pattern on the comments to “Amanda Knox Test” and tell me there’s not a correlation between favoring Knox’s innocence and getting upvoted. (Don’t forget to load all the comments so you see the people who are negative despite making reasoned comments about the case.)
Just for the record, I’m also an SIAI donor.
You don’t currently need any extra slack from me though :-)
May I ask what exactly this slack consists of in the context?
All sorts. For example, if I rate someone highly and they write something that at first glance seems to be obviously wrong, I’m more likely to put time into seeing if I’ve missed something.
You also haven’t cared to make any contribution on the topic of rationality. The karma system serves to prevent new posters posting Mind Killing Advocacy. I do not understand why that process did not work in this instance. I count few posts of yours that have not been either in the Knox thread or dragging the Knox issue to other parts of the site by criticizing Komponisto. The system, if working as advertised, would not have allowed this post.
If your thesis is that debunking the content of a featured post in this forum, is not on-topic for this forum, then I personally disagree. If someone posts false information as a featured post, then I personally would prefer to be informed that it is false rather than continue believing false information. There are probably other readers who feel the same, and I hope this post provided such a service to them.
It is not. I take Vive’s thesis as granted and assume it is obvious to most readers. My own contention is that this post should not have been made and should not have been able to be posted by a user with no karma.
Rolf, even if you don’t care about karma, it might be good practice to keep LW visibly about rationality, and so to briefly recap the relevance of this post to LW and rationality (via its history with komposito’s post), rather than have it appear that Amanda Knox or other current events are interesting here in their own right.
Though I understand if you don’t have time.
So edited, though I would have thought it obvious.
If you post here more often, you’ll learn that certain linguistic patterns are required for the community to not get annoyed at you when making strong-sounding conclusions. Try not to take it too seriously.
One regular poster here is a current theist. He has a lot of karma because he surrounds many of his statements in self-doubt.
I completely agree with you that surrounding my statements with self-doubt would have increased my karma.
However, I do not agree that this is a sufficient reason to surround my statements with self-doubt. As I said, I don’t care about karma.
I do care about things that often correlate with karma, such as accuracy and insight. If there is evidence that surrounding these statements with self-doubt will increase my accuracy, I will do it. Therefore, I look forward to any evidence proffered that my claim C1 is incorrect (such as an argument that one of komponisto’s four statements I’ve charged to be misleading is, in fact, correct). So far, I have not heard any such evidence in this thread.
For example, “:s/Knox//g” helps.
More seriously, that phenomenon extends far beyond LessWrong and applies particularly when the comments are personal (or reflect on an individual fairly directly).
Again, empirically, “:s/Knox is guilty/Knox is innocent/g” helps even more.
Unless people think that “voting up comments you agree with and voting down things you disagree with” only happens on other sites, in which case I’m curious by what mechanism you think this is enforced on this site.
It’d help if you picked a group belief that’s actually demonstrably wrong to illustrate this, but you picked a hella wrong target this time around. Did you read through ~700 or so comments on the other Knox posts, or only the original posts?
The dynamic you mention is certainly present (and, there is some benefit to allowing disagreement at least a partial influence on votes). Unfortunately, in this instance it is hard to distinguish simple disagreement from disapproval of bad arguments and prvalent logical rudeness. The same people who disagree with Knox being guilty are people who object to the type of reasoning used to support this contention. That’s part of how they became convinced of her innocence in the first place.
What does this mean?
It’s unix-speak for ‘replace all instances of the string Knox with the empty string’.
That as time goes by more rehashing of the Knox issue becomes less desirable. Anything with ‘Knox’ in it becomes a negative linguistic pattern.
The command “:s/Knox//g” replaces the pattern ‘Knox’ with the ″ empty string using perl like regexp syntax.
I’ve noticed before that people will sometimes object that a top level post was unsuitable, when in fact it just means they disagree with it.
I downvoted the Knox is innocent post.
In that case my previous comment doesn’t apply to you, but I don’t withdraw it in general, because I have certainly seen other people object to posts as unsuitable, when it is clear that in fact their real reason is that they disagree with the content of the post.
I value your opinion. Please downvote komponisto’s post as well then (if you haven’t already) if you want to be consistent, as it’s (as of this writing) at +30.
I believe already have, primarily because it encouraged an influx of posters only interested in political advocacy of one kind of another. It significantly lowered the quality of conversation for some time.. I did, however, upvote Komponisto’s earlier survey style post, which was an excellent exercise in rationality.
That is a shame. You indicated at the time that you enjoyed my post; it doesn’t seem right to downvote a post that meets the internal standards of LW simply because of the traffic it brings in. Yes, there were some low-quality comments, but they were downvoted to invisibility—just like it’s supposed to work. Meanwhile, we also managed to host what was and probably remains the highest-quality discussion of that particular controversial hot-topic on any Internet forum.
It may also be worth considering the new (legitimate) readers we may have picked up as a result of a post that received greater-than-usual outside exposure.
Finally, I don’t think we should go back and downvote old posts that we liked to be “fair” to recent posts that we don’t, just because they’re on the same topic. That seems silly.
I am convinced, on all counts and have reverted the change. In the context your post warranted a positive reception. On the other hand I do think new posts now made on other similar issues of contention are something to be wary of encouraging and I have little doubt that I’ll downvote similar posts in the future.
At the level of self awareness I notice my ethical instincts being pushed away from my usual consequentialist leanings and towards deontological thinking when engaged personally and in a positive manner. This seems to be a typical response and I know that I experience the reverse change strongly when met with aggressive or socially presumptive engagement.. Interesting.
People say things like this here something like ten to a hundred times more frequently than they do anywhere else I have ever frequented.
That’s still not much.
My hunch is that thinking style combined years of frustration at intellectual discourse being ruined by status considerations play a strong part there in many cases.
Sounds reasonable. I wonder if there should be more survey style posts then, but on topics that will have verifiable outcomes. For example, one could pick out a topic from one of the prediction markets and discuss that. This would have the advantage that, at the end of the day, if someone come to the wrong conclusion, they would eventually realize they came to the wrong conclusion and have an opportunity to learn something from the exercise.
I totally agree (and made a similar suggestion in the recent games thread.)
War in Iran by 2016 might be a possible candidate.
Sounds like a good one. But I expect you to have a better estimate than I do on that topic so I’m not going to bet against you!
I’m shocked and dismayed that anyone went back and downvoted koponisto’s post, which is probably the best discussion we’ve ever had here.