Do so in whatever manner seems most desirable to you.
This is my attempt to figure out what is most desirable to me. At the moment, I want to do whatever would be the best overall policy if everyone followed it, with “best” here being defined as “resulting in the best lesswrong possible” (with a very complicated definition of best that I don’t think I can specify well).
Given that that’s what I want, how best to achieve it? The karma system is valuable because it makes more visible posts that are highly upvoted, so it’s valuable to the extent that the highest upvoted comments are the best.
It should be noted that only relative karma matters (for sorting within an article), and the karma of other posts will tend to be rising (most posts wind up with positive karma). There is some number between 0 and 1 (call it x)that represents the expected vote of someone who votes.
Because karma is relative, if you’ve decide you care enough to vote, you should subtract x from your vote to determine if it counts as evidence that the post is good or bad. Do you want to vote 1-x, -x, or −1-x? Note 1-x>0, and the other two (not voting and down voting) are less than 0, downvoting by quite a bit. Which of these best corresponds to the sentiment “I liked this but think it’s overrated”?
This is my attempt to figure out what is most desirable to me. At the moment, I want to do whatever would be the best overall policy if everyone followed it, with “best” here being defined as “resulting in the best lesswrong possible” (with a very complicated definition of best that I don’t think I can specify well).
Given that that’s what I want, how best to achieve it? The karma system is valuable because it makes more visible posts that are highly upvoted, so it’s valuable to the extent that the highest upvoted comments are the best.
It should be noted that only relative karma matters (for sorting within an article), and the karma of other posts will tend to be rising (most posts wind up with positive karma). There is some number between 0 and 1 (call it x)that represents the expected vote of someone who votes.
Because karma is relative, if you’ve decide you care enough to vote, you should subtract x from your vote to determine if it counts as evidence that the post is good or bad. Do you want to vote 1-x, -x, or −1-x? Note 1-x>0, and the other two (not voting and down voting) are less than 0, downvoting by quite a bit. Which of these best corresponds to the sentiment “I liked this but think it’s overrated”?
I roughly follow the following (prioritized) rules:
Up-vote if I want to see more posts like this/down-vote if I don’t want to see more posts like this, regardless of the current total.
A comment that I do not feel very strongly about I may up- or down-vote based on what total karma I expect the comment of this kind to deserve.
Very occasionally, I might like or dislike the author for unrelated reasons, and decide to up-/down-vote based on that.