To make an outrageous metaphor: our brains run a system rather like Less Wrong’s karma.
It’s not outrageous at all, actually. Affective asynchrony shows that we have independent ratings of goodness and badness, just like LW votes… but on the outside of the system, all that shows is the result of combining them.
That is, we can readily see what someone “votes” for different things in their environment, but not what inputs are being summed. And when we look at ourselves, we expect to find a single “score” on a thing.
The main difference is that in humans, upvotes and downvotes don’t count the same, and a sufficiently high imbalance between the two can squelch the losing direction. On the other hand, a close match between the two results in “mixed feelings” and a low probability of acting, even if the idea really is a good one.
And good decision-making in humans requires (at minimum) examining the rationale behind any downvotes, and throwing out the irrational ones.
It’s not outrageous at all, actually. Affective asynchrony shows that we have independent ratings of goodness and badness, just like LW votes… but on the outside of the system, all that shows is the result of combining them.
That is, we can readily see what someone “votes” for different things in their environment, but not what inputs are being summed. And when we look at ourselves, we expect to find a single “score” on a thing.
The main difference is that in humans, upvotes and downvotes don’t count the same, and a sufficiently high imbalance between the two can squelch the losing direction. On the other hand, a close match between the two results in “mixed feelings” and a low probability of acting, even if the idea really is a good one.
And good decision-making in humans requires (at minimum) examining the rationale behind any downvotes, and throwing out the irrational ones.