Well, people expect him to be making good points, even when they don’t understand him
And I really, really wish people would stop doing that, whether it’s for Wei_Dai or anyone else you deem to be smart.
Folks, you may think you’re doing us all a favor by voting someone up because they’re smart, but that policy has the effect of creating an information cascade, because it makes an inference bounce back, accumulating arbitrarily high support irrespective of its relationship to reality.
The content of a post or comment should screen off any other information about its value [1], including who made it.
[1] except in obvious cases like when someone is confirming that something is true about that person specifically
Please only vote up posts you both understand and approve of.
I agree, but would like to point out that I don’t see any evidence that people aren’t already doing this. As far as I can tell, Lucas was only speculating that people voted up my post based on the author. Several other of myrecentposts have fairly low scores, for example. (All of them advocated further thinking as well, so I don’t think that’s it either.)
And I really, really wish people would stop doing that, whether it’s for Wei_Dai or anyone else you deem to be smart.
Folks, you may think you’re doing us all a favor by voting someone up because they’re smart, but that policy has the effect of creating an information cascade, because it makes an inference bounce back, accumulating arbitrarily high support irrespective of its relationship to reality.
The content of a post or comment should screen off any other information about its value [1], including who made it.
[1] except in obvious cases like when someone is confirming that something is true about that person specifically
Seconded. Please only vote up posts you both understand and approve of.
I agree, but would like to point out that I don’t see any evidence that people aren’t already doing this. As far as I can tell, Lucas was only speculating that people voted up my post based on the author. Several other of my recent posts have fairly low scores, for example. (All of them advocated further thinking as well, so I don’t think that’s it either.)