I have an alternate perspective. If something doesn’t attract a lot of attention, I don’t really want to put a lot of effort into thinking about it, because I have other things to do, and it seems no one cares either way.
But if I put some thought into something, and make a fairly detailed post, and get 20 net upvotes but no comments, and the next lower post in the thread has four net upvotes, I don’t necessarily know what it was about what I posted that made it not just good, but so much better then everything else, and it seems like knowing that would be helpful so I could repeat that.
This thread here is a good example of this: (at the time that I posted it: Obviously, more people may add discussion/upvotes/downvotes)
If I had made a simpler, smaller post that I felt a bit more certain about, I would just assume the upvotes meant “Yes, I agree.” But in this case, people were strongly upvoting something I myself was uncertain about, which seems to leave me with “I’m glad you approve, but I don’t know what you approve of because I myself don’t feel confident about what the answer is, I’m just trying to break the question apart into separate possibilities and detailing some of the limited evidence I do have.”
That’s probably exactly it. The process of thinking about the question and analyzing it for me is something I’d want to encourage, particularly in subjects in which I have little to no expertise, so I’d upvote it.
(This has the obvious dangers, of course, but there’s usually enough expert-ish people on any given topic on LW that controversial assumptions get brought out into the open fast. )
I have an alternate perspective. If something doesn’t attract a lot of attention, I don’t really want to put a lot of effort into thinking about it, because I have other things to do, and it seems no one cares either way.
But if I put some thought into something, and make a fairly detailed post, and get 20 net upvotes but no comments, and the next lower post in the thread has four net upvotes, I don’t necessarily know what it was about what I posted that made it not just good, but so much better then everything else, and it seems like knowing that would be helpful so I could repeat that.
This thread here is a good example of this: (at the time that I posted it: Obviously, more people may add discussion/upvotes/downvotes)
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/inm/signaling_of_what_precisely/9rfm
If I had made a simpler, smaller post that I felt a bit more certain about, I would just assume the upvotes meant “Yes, I agree.” But in this case, people were strongly upvoting something I myself was uncertain about, which seems to leave me with “I’m glad you approve, but I don’t know what you approve of because I myself don’t feel confident about what the answer is, I’m just trying to break the question apart into separate possibilities and detailing some of the limited evidence I do have.”
That’s probably exactly it. The process of thinking about the question and analyzing it for me is something I’d want to encourage, particularly in subjects in which I have little to no expertise, so I’d upvote it.
(This has the obvious dangers, of course, but there’s usually enough expert-ish people on any given topic on LW that controversial assumptions get brought out into the open fast. )
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense in this context.