5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be.
This disadvantages questions which are posted late (to a greater extent than would give people an optimal incentive to post questions early). (It also disadvantages questions which start with a low number of upvotes by historical accident and then are displayed low on the page, and are not viewed as much by users who might upvote them.)
It’s not your fault; I just wish the LW software had a statistical model which explained observed votes and replies in terms of a latent “comment quality level”, because of situations like this, where it could matter if a worse comment got a high rating while a better comment got a low one. (I also wish forums with comment ratings used ideas related to value of information, optimal sequential preference elicitation, and/or n-armed bandit problems to decide when to show users comments whose subjective latent quality has a low marginal mean but a high marginal variance, in case the (”)true(”) quality of a comment is high, because of the possibility that a user will rate the comment highly and let the forum software know that it should show the comment to other users.)
There’s probably significant value in the low-hanging fruit of just tweaking the parameters in the current algorithm (which are currently set for the much larger reddit!). Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
This disadvantages questions which are posted late (to a greater extent than would give people an optimal incentive to post questions early). (It also disadvantages questions which start with a low number of upvotes by historical accident and then are displayed low on the page, and are not viewed as much by users who might upvote them.)
It’s not your fault; I just wish the LW software had a statistical model which explained observed votes and replies in terms of a latent “comment quality level”, because of situations like this, where it could matter if a worse comment got a high rating while a better comment got a low one. (I also wish forums with comment ratings used ideas related to value of information, optimal sequential preference elicitation, and/or n-armed bandit problems to decide when to show users comments whose subjective latent quality has a low marginal mean but a high marginal variance, in case the (”)true(”) quality of a comment is high, because of the possibility that a user will rate the comment highly and let the forum software know that it should show the comment to other users.)
Reddit has implemented a ‘best’ view which tries to compensate for this kind of thing: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html
LW is based on reddit’s source code, so it should be relatively easy to integrate.
There’s probably significant value in the low-hanging fruit of just tweaking the parameters in the current algorithm (which are currently set for the much larger reddit!). Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.