I don’t normally downvote your contributions (and indeed had just upvoted one), but I downvoted this one for whining about downvotes. (Especially as its parent is actually at +13 right now—maybe it was at −3 or something when you originally wrote the above, though.)
Anyone who categorically or near-categorically downvotes your contributions is unlikely to be swayed by a polite request for them not to do so.
Anyone who categorically or near-categorically downvotes your contributions is unlikely to be swayed by a polite request for them not to do so.
Of course, but in this case it seemed deontologically necessary to request it anyway; I would feel guilty if I didn’t even make a token effort to keep people from being needlessly self-defeating. This happens to me all the time: “if it’s normally distributed then you should just straightforwardly optimize for the median outcome” versus “a heavy-tailed distribution is more accurate or at least acts as a better proxy for accuracy, we should optimize for rare but significant events on the tails”. I feel like the latter is often the case but people systematically don’t see it and subsequently predictably shoot their own feet off.
ETA: “To not forget scenarios consistent with the evidence, even at the cost of overweighting them; to prioritize low relative entropy over low expected absolute error, as a proxy for expected costs from error.”
If you consider it important that certain contributions not be unfairly downvoted, and you consider it likely that making those contributions under your name will result in them being unfairly downvoted, it would seem to follow that you consider it important not to make those contributions under your name. No?
It does follow but I might still take the lesser of two evils and post it anyway. It’s true that if I used a different name that would have been strictly better; for some reason that idea hadn’t occurred to me. (Upvoted.) In retrospect I should have found the third option, but in practice when commenting on LW I’m normally already feeling as if I’ve gone out of my way to take a third option and feel that if I kept on in that vein I would get paralyzed and super-stressed. Perhaps I should update once again towards thinking harder and more broadly even at the cost of an even greater risk of paralysis.
That said, sometimes thinking dilemmas through after I’ve made (and implemented) a decision and then, if I find a viable third option, noting it in my head so that it comes to mind more readily the next time I’m faced with a similar decision, can get me broad thinking and nonparalysis.
I don’t normally downvote your contributions (and indeed had just upvoted one), but I downvoted this one for whining about downvotes. (Especially as its parent is actually at +13 right now—maybe it was at −3 or something when you originally wrote the above, though.)
Anyone who categorically or near-categorically downvotes your contributions is unlikely to be swayed by a polite request for them not to do so.
Of course, but in this case it seemed deontologically necessary to request it anyway; I would feel guilty if I didn’t even make a token effort to keep people from being needlessly self-defeating. This happens to me all the time: “if it’s normally distributed then you should just straightforwardly optimize for the median outcome” versus “a heavy-tailed distribution is more accurate or at least acts as a better proxy for accuracy, we should optimize for rare but significant events on the tails”. I feel like the latter is often the case but people systematically don’t see it and subsequently predictably shoot their own feet off.
ETA: “To not forget scenarios consistent with the evidence, even at the cost of overweighting them; to prioritize low relative entropy over low expected absolute error, as a proxy for expected costs from error.”
If you consider it important that certain contributions not be unfairly downvoted, and you consider it likely that making those contributions under your name will result in them being unfairly downvoted, it would seem to follow that you consider it important not to make those contributions under your name. No?
It does follow but I might still take the lesser of two evils and post it anyway. It’s true that if I used a different name that would have been strictly better; for some reason that idea hadn’t occurred to me. (Upvoted.) In retrospect I should have found the third option, but in practice when commenting on LW I’m normally already feeling as if I’ve gone out of my way to take a third option and feel that if I kept on in that vein I would get paralyzed and super-stressed. Perhaps I should update once again towards thinking harder and more broadly even at the cost of an even greater risk of paralysis.
Well, I endorse nonparalysis.
That said, sometimes thinking dilemmas through after I’ve made (and implemented) a decision and then, if I find a viable third option, noting it in my head so that it comes to mind more readily the next time I’m faced with a similar decision, can get me broad thinking and nonparalysis.