I wonder how much Yvain’s rather high score of 31 has to do with EY’s good review.
I’ve noticed this too, and that comments by higher status users, particularly Eliezer, tend to be voted higher than IMHO equal quality comments by less popular users...
power corrupting people?
...but it’s hardly Eliezer’s fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.
It could also be a kind of unconscious Bayesian adjustment. If a comment is written by someone who tends to write high-quality comments, that increases the probability that this comment is high-quality from what you’d estimate just from reading the text. But I’d rather we didn’t take that into account—we should mark comments based on own opinion of whether it’s high quality, not our estimate of the probability of it being high-quality based on info like that, or the voting would resemble that of a Keynesian beauty contest.
A dream feature, not something I seriously expect the people at Tricycle to work on: I want an option for a voluntary “blind mode” in preferences. People in blind mode wouldn’t be able to see the poster of a comment’s name or the comment’s current karma score until they either voted up, voted down, or clicked a new “vote neutral” button; after voting, the poster and karma score would be revealed but the vote could not be changed.
Reason: I find myself slightly tempted to vote up the articles of people who voted up my articles as a form of reciprocity, or else to vote up the articles of people who didn’t vote up my articles to prove I’m not doing that. I’m sure on an unconscious level the temptation is much worse. Plus this would solve the information cascades problem.
″...but it’s hardly Eliezer’s fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.”
Yes, this is true. If he hadn’t written the “every cause wants to be a cult” post, I would probably also be busy requesting that he give himself absolute power. My comment was more aimed at roland.
I’ve noticed this too, and that comments by higher status users, particularly Eliezer, tend to be voted higher than IMHO equal quality comments by less popular users...
...but it’s hardly Eliezer’s fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.
It could also be a kind of unconscious Bayesian adjustment. If a comment is written by someone who tends to write high-quality comments, that increases the probability that this comment is high-quality from what you’d estimate just from reading the text. But I’d rather we didn’t take that into account—we should mark comments based on own opinion of whether it’s high quality, not our estimate of the probability of it being high-quality based on info like that, or the voting would resemble that of a Keynesian beauty contest.
A dream feature, not something I seriously expect the people at Tricycle to work on: I want an option for a voluntary “blind mode” in preferences. People in blind mode wouldn’t be able to see the poster of a comment’s name or the comment’s current karma score until they either voted up, voted down, or clicked a new “vote neutral” button; after voting, the poster and karma score would be revealed but the vote could not be changed.
Reason: I find myself slightly tempted to vote up the articles of people who voted up my articles as a form of reciprocity, or else to vote up the articles of people who didn’t vote up my articles to prove I’m not doing that. I’m sure on an unconscious level the temptation is much worse. Plus this would solve the information cascades problem.
See Marcello’s antikibitzer.
How do you know who voted up your articles?
The default setting is that votes are public—you can check a user’s profile page to see what he liked/disliked.
″...but it’s hardly Eliezer’s fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.”
Yes, this is true. If he hadn’t written the “every cause wants to be a cult” post, I would probably also be busy requesting that he give himself absolute power. My comment was more aimed at roland.