I would love to see a post on the rational behind the reputation system on this site.
Imagine a thousand professional philosophers would join lesswrong, or worse, a thousand creationists. If that happened, would someones karma score still reflect the persons rationality? I’m not saying that this is the case right now, since most people who don’t agree with lesswrong won’t join or bother to stay around for very long. But technically the lesswrong reputation system is susceptible to failure, it would just need one call by someone like P.Z. Myers to have thousands of mediocre rationalists, or trolls, join and start messing up the voting system.
But that’s just the most obvious problem. The availability of a reputation system also discourages people to actually explain themselves by being able to let off steam or ignore cognitive dissonance by downvoting someone with a single mouse click. If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit. The person who is wrong would benefit by being provided an actual explanation for why someone disagrees and therefore wouldn’t be able to easily believe that the person who disagrees just doesn’t like their opinion for irrational reasons. The person who disagrees would have to be more specific and maybe name some concrete reasons for their disagreement and that way notice that it might be them who is wrong or that their disagreement with the other person isn’t as strong as they thought. Everyone else reading the conversation would be able to discern if all parties involved in the discussion actually understand each other or talk past each other.
Another problem is that a reputation system might drive away people with valuable insights about certain agreed upon topics. The initial population of a community might have been biased about something and the reputation system might provide a positive incentive to keep the bias and a negative incentive for those who disagree.
Imagine a thousand professional philosophers would join lesswrong
Imagine.
EDIT: In response to downvotes, I will explain:
Philip turned to Sparta; he sent them a message, “You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.” Their laconic reply: “If”. Philip and Alexander would both leave them alone.
It may be of interest that the word “laconic” is exactly the right one. Laconia = Sparta (well, strictly Sparta was just one part of Laconia) and its people were famously terse.
If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit.
No, if someone e.g starts randomly insulting people, or being utterly clumsy in their reasoning, and then everyone would have to voice their disagreement, repeatedly, that would be noise atop of noise. It would crowd out any signal in the discussion.
Some types of disagreement at least need be able to be expressed without noising up the place. One of these is “You’re very obviously wrong, and this comment is bad for this place, and it’s bad for this place that I even have to use two sentences to you to explain why”.
The person who is wrong would benefit by being provided an actual explanation for why someone disagrees
Even in the better cases scenario where there are no trolls or spammers involved—what makes you think that you have to choose between only the options “Someone disagrees with you and you don’t know why” and “Someone disagrees with you, and you’re told why”—and you don’t consider the third option “You have no way of knowing if anyone agrees or disagrees with you”?
You seem to think that the only alternative of “downvoting and not commenting” is “commenting”—so that we need only prevent downvotes to encourage discussion. Ofcourse there are atleast two alternatives instead, and one of them is “not downvoting and not commenting either”.
Then the members wouldn’t get any feedback, not even that of a downvote/upvote; they wouldn’t even know if anyone even read their posts.
I’d find that even more depressing. An upvote or a downvote is atleast knowledge that someone read what I had to say.
The person who disagrees would have to be more specific and maybe name some concrete reasons for their disagreement and that way notice that
No, another option they would have is to not reply at all. Or to call other people names. Or to lower the tone of the conversation.
A downvote is an easy way to tell someone “I believe you’re doing something wrong” without the addition of noise.
Ah, now I feel extremely silly. The irony did not occur to me; it was simply a long comment that I agreed with completely, and I wasn’t satisfied merely upvoting it because it didn’t have any (other) upvotes yet at the time. Plus, doubly ironically, I was on a moral crusade to defend the karma system...
The availability of a reputation system also discourages people to actually explain themselves by being able to let off steam or ignore cognitive dissonance by downvoting someone with a single mouse click. If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit.
An extremely doubtful assertion—it seems much more likely that a raised feedback threshold would have the effect of reducing feedback levels.
An extremely doubtful assertion—it seems much more likely that a raised feedback threshold would have the main effect of reducing feedback levels.
Indeed. This is my experience in discussions anytime there isn’t reputation feedback “So, does everyone just agree with me or did no one read my comment?”
Imagine a thousand professional philosophers would join lesswrong, or worse, a thousand creationists.
This test seems rather unfair—it’s pretty much a known that people who join LessWrong are likely to be already sympathetic to the LessWrong’s way of thinking. Besides, the only way to avoid a situation where thousands of dissidents joining could wreck the system is to have centralized power, i.e., more traditional moderation, which I think we were hoping to avoid for exactly the types of reasons that are being brought up here (politics, etc.).
The availability of a reputation system also discourages people to actually explain themselves by being able to let off steam or ignore cognitive dissonance by downvoting someone with a single mouse click.
True, but I think you have missed a positive incentive for response that is created by the reputation system in addition to the negative ones—a post/comment with a bad argument or worse creates an opportunity to win karma by writing a clear refutation, and I frequently see such responses being highly upvoted.
The initial population of a community might have been biased about something and the reputation system might provide a positive incentive to keep the bias and a negative incentive for those who disagree.
This is a problem, but based purely on my subjective experience it seems that people are more than willing to upvote posts that try to shatter a conventional LessWrong belief, and do so with good argumentation.
One of my ever-pending posts to write is on what sort of simple interface might prevent online arguments from retracing the same points over and over. I suspect it will not be graphical with boxes, because that makes poor use of screen real estate. I suspect it will not have lots of fancy argument types and patterns, because no one really uses that stuff. I think it does need to have a karma system, because otherwise there’s no way to find the good stuff.
The basic rationale is filtering; the current system is satisficing, given some reasonable assumptions as to how online communities work, and has the “feature” of being inherited from a successful web site and thus being a “proven solution” rather than something speculative designed from scratch.
The major issue with LW’s current karma system is information cascades; that has been acknowledged almost from the start of LW. Yet solutions intended to correct this have not been widely adopted.
The main reason to have a karma system, IMO, is to make discussions more readable by ordering comments by quality. This seems to work very well. Providing feedback to commenters is another important reason. But keeping a record of everyone’s accumulated karma isn’t necessary for either of those functions, and that feature could possibly be gotten rid of entirely.
“Readable” is the wrong word here—especially since the resulting distortion of the chronological ordering often makes discussions less readable. The actual intended object of maximization is not readability but rather impressiveness (showing off how “good” LW’s comments are to new readers), or something like that (see here ).
I disapprove of this, and think the purposes of karma are/should be these two: (1) to make trolls invisible; (2) to reward the authors of high-quality comments, thereby incentivizing the latter.
When I used the term “readability”, I was admittedly thinking of big sites like Reddit (or Slashdot, though it seems to have less traffic these days), where sorting-by-karma is pretty much obligatory if you don’t want to spend a lot of time reading through dozens of garbage comments for each interesting one. The signal-to-noise ratio is much better here, so maybe “readability” isn’t the right to term to use on LW (though that could change).
But sorting by karma certainly makes discussions much more pleasant/convenient/useful to read on LW as well. Thanks to karma sorting, the worthwhile parts of the discussion are easy to find and you can limit yourself to only reading the best comments.
I don’t find the mixed up chronology to be an issue. In my experience, the only problem with it was that new comments were hard to find, and that issue has mostly been solved by the highlighting of new comments. Your point that it may be confusing to newcomers is valid, but then there are other sites that use sorting by karma as well. It’s not like we’re the only ones using it.
Huh. I tend to disagree with you quite frequently, but I give your opinion on the karma system a lot of weight because you have a great many comments heavily upvoted and heavily downvoted.
Karma seems to be a potentially-important tool for calming rogue corporations. We want corporations to be well behaved—partly since they may become powerful by developing mechanical hearts and minds. Just in case anyone is about to tell me that you can’t use a carrot and a stick on a machine intelligence, I do know all about the issues there.
FWIW, I tend to mostly ignore the karma of my own posts here—not wanting to be excessively influenced by the masses.
Another problem is that a reputation system might drive away people with
valuable insights about certain agreed upon topics.
Relax, I doubt anyone with the ability to produce high-quality thinking is so insecure that (s)he’d be scared of getting a few downvotes on a website. (Myself, I once got an article submission voted to oblivion, but it just felt good in a feeling-of-superiority kind of way since I thought the LW community was the party being more wrong there—though I think that to have found myself to be more wrong than I think I was would have felt good too.)
In general, I find it weird how some people manage to take the karma system so seriously. I thought it was acknowledged all along by the community that it’s a very crude thing with only very limited usefulness (though still worth having).
Relax, I doubt anyone with the ability to produce high-quality thinking is so insecure that (s)he’d be scared of getting a few downvotes on a website.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the ability to produce high-quality thinking actually correlated with insecurity. People who spend time developing intellectual skills often neglect developing social skills, and a lack of friends/real social contact then makes them feel insecure.
I think you’re probably right if we count more stuff as “high-quality thinking” than I was meaning to do. But if we’re rather strict about what counts as high-quality, I think I’m right.
(Also I’ll emphasize that I wasn’t talking about insecurity in general, but being insecure to such an extent that one refrains from posting high-quality stuff to an anonymity-enabling website because of a fear of getting downvoted.)
I would love to see a post on the rational behind the reputation system on this site.
Imagine a thousand professional philosophers would join lesswrong, or worse, a thousand creationists. If that happened, would someones karma score still reflect the persons rationality? I’m not saying that this is the case right now, since most people who don’t agree with lesswrong won’t join or bother to stay around for very long. But technically the lesswrong reputation system is susceptible to failure, it would just need one call by someone like P.Z. Myers to have thousands of mediocre rationalists, or trolls, join and start messing up the voting system.
But that’s just the most obvious problem. The availability of a reputation system also discourages people to actually explain themselves by being able to let off steam or ignore cognitive dissonance by downvoting someone with a single mouse click. If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit. The person who is wrong would benefit by being provided an actual explanation for why someone disagrees and therefore wouldn’t be able to easily believe that the person who disagrees just doesn’t like their opinion for irrational reasons. The person who disagrees would have to be more specific and maybe name some concrete reasons for their disagreement and that way notice that it might be them who is wrong or that their disagreement with the other person isn’t as strong as they thought. Everyone else reading the conversation would be able to discern if all parties involved in the discussion actually understand each other or talk past each other.
Another problem is that a reputation system might drive away people with valuable insights about certain agreed upon topics. The initial population of a community might have been biased about something and the reputation system might provide a positive incentive to keep the bias and a negative incentive for those who disagree.
Completely off topic but my … a few hundred LWers vs. thousands of professional philosophers. That sounds like an idea for a fanfic webcomic.
“A thousand proponents of mainstream philosophy descend upon you! Our down votes will blot out the sequences!”
Imagine.
EDIT: In response to downvotes, I will explain:
It may be of interest that the word “laconic” is exactly the right one. Laconia = Sparta (well, strictly Sparta was just one part of Laconia) and its people were famously terse.
Superfluous.
“Then we shall argue in the shade!”
“Then we shall argue with citations!”
“Tonight, we posit far-fetched cosmic torture scenarios in hell!”
No, if someone e.g starts randomly insulting people, or being utterly clumsy in their reasoning, and then everyone would have to voice their disagreement, repeatedly, that would be noise atop of noise. It would crowd out any signal in the discussion.
Some types of disagreement at least need be able to be expressed without noising up the place. One of these is “You’re very obviously wrong, and this comment is bad for this place, and it’s bad for this place that I even have to use two sentences to you to explain why”.
Even in the better cases scenario where there are no trolls or spammers involved—what makes you think that you have to choose between only the options “Someone disagrees with you and you don’t know why” and “Someone disagrees with you, and you’re told why”—and you don’t consider the third option “You have no way of knowing if anyone agrees or disagrees with you”?
You seem to think that the only alternative of “downvoting and not commenting” is “commenting”—so that we need only prevent downvotes to encourage discussion. Ofcourse there are atleast two alternatives instead, and one of them is “not downvoting and not commenting either”.
Then the members wouldn’t get any feedback, not even that of a downvote/upvote; they wouldn’t even know if anyone even read their posts.
I’d find that even more depressing. An upvote or a downvote is atleast knowledge that someone read what I had to say.
No, another option they would have is to not reply at all. Or to call other people names. Or to lower the tone of the conversation.
A downvote is an easy way to tell someone “I believe you’re doing something wrong” without the addition of noise.
Right on.
I’m hoping you meant this ironically.
Ah, now I feel extremely silly. The irony did not occur to me; it was simply a long comment that I agreed with completely, and I wasn’t satisfied merely upvoting it because it didn’t have any (other) upvotes yet at the time. Plus, doubly ironically, I was on a moral crusade to defend the karma system...
Right, what about an agree/disagree feature?
An extremely doubtful assertion—it seems much more likely that a raised feedback threshold would have the effect of reducing feedback levels.
Indeed. This is my experience in discussions anytime there isn’t reputation feedback “So, does everyone just agree with me or did no one read my comment?”
This test seems rather unfair—it’s pretty much a known that people who join LessWrong are likely to be already sympathetic to the LessWrong’s way of thinking. Besides, the only way to avoid a situation where thousands of dissidents joining could wreck the system is to have centralized power, i.e., more traditional moderation, which I think we were hoping to avoid for exactly the types of reasons that are being brought up here (politics, etc.).
True, but I think you have missed a positive incentive for response that is created by the reputation system in addition to the negative ones—a post/comment with a bad argument or worse creates an opportunity to win karma by writing a clear refutation, and I frequently see such responses being highly upvoted.
This is a problem, but based purely on my subjective experience it seems that people are more than willing to upvote posts that try to shatter a conventional LessWrong belief, and do so with good argumentation.
Quoting Eliezer:
The basic rationale is filtering; the current system is satisficing, given some reasonable assumptions as to how online communities work, and has the “feature” of being inherited from a successful web site and thus being a “proven solution” rather than something speculative designed from scratch.
The major issue with LW’s current karma system is information cascades; that has been acknowledged almost from the start of LW. Yet solutions intended to correct this have not been widely adopted.
The main reason to have a karma system, IMO, is to make discussions more readable by ordering comments by quality. This seems to work very well. Providing feedback to commenters is another important reason. But keeping a record of everyone’s accumulated karma isn’t necessary for either of those functions, and that feature could possibly be gotten rid of entirely.
“Readable” is the wrong word here—especially since the resulting distortion of the chronological ordering often makes discussions less readable. The actual intended object of maximization is not readability but rather impressiveness (showing off how “good” LW’s comments are to new readers), or something like that (see here ).
I disapprove of this, and think the purposes of karma are/should be these two: (1) to make trolls invisible; (2) to reward the authors of high-quality comments, thereby incentivizing the latter.
When I used the term “readability”, I was admittedly thinking of big sites like Reddit (or Slashdot, though it seems to have less traffic these days), where sorting-by-karma is pretty much obligatory if you don’t want to spend a lot of time reading through dozens of garbage comments for each interesting one. The signal-to-noise ratio is much better here, so maybe “readability” isn’t the right to term to use on LW (though that could change).
But sorting by karma certainly makes discussions much more pleasant/convenient/useful to read on LW as well. Thanks to karma sorting, the worthwhile parts of the discussion are easy to find and you can limit yourself to only reading the best comments.
I don’t find the mixed up chronology to be an issue. In my experience, the only problem with it was that new comments were hard to find, and that issue has mostly been solved by the highlighting of new comments. Your point that it may be confusing to newcomers is valid, but then there are other sites that use sorting by karma as well. It’s not like we’re the only ones using it.
Well, reputation systems are good. More could be said, but that is the gist.
Huh. I tend to disagree with you quite frequently, but I give your opinion on the karma system a lot of weight because you have a great many comments heavily upvoted and heavily downvoted.
My “universal karma” rant explains some of my views.
Karma seems to be a potentially-important tool for calming rogue corporations. We want corporations to be well behaved—partly since they may become powerful by developing mechanical hearts and minds. Just in case anyone is about to tell me that you can’t use a carrot and a stick on a machine intelligence, I do know all about the issues there.
FWIW, I tend to mostly ignore the karma of my own posts here—not wanting to be excessively influenced by the masses.
I’m kicking myself for not registering my prediction.
What prediction was that?
This one.
Relax, I doubt anyone with the ability to produce high-quality thinking is so insecure that (s)he’d be scared of getting a few downvotes on a website. (Myself, I once got an article submission voted to oblivion, but it just felt good in a feeling-of-superiority kind of way since I thought the LW community was the party being more wrong there—though I think that to have found myself to be more wrong than I think I was would have felt good too.)
In general, I find it weird how some people manage to take the karma system so seriously. I thought it was acknowledged all along by the community that it’s a very crude thing with only very limited usefulness (though still worth having).
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the ability to produce high-quality thinking actually correlated with insecurity. People who spend time developing intellectual skills often neglect developing social skills, and a lack of friends/real social contact then makes them feel insecure.
I think you’re probably right if we count more stuff as “high-quality thinking” than I was meaning to do. But if we’re rather strict about what counts as high-quality, I think I’m right.
(Also I’ll emphasize that I wasn’t talking about insecurity in general, but being insecure to such an extent that one refrains from posting high-quality stuff to an anonymity-enabling website because of a fear of getting downvoted.)