As I see it, voting on LessWrong isn’t directly a measure of anything other than how much other readers on LessWrong chose to click the upvote and downvote buttons. It gets used by the site as a proxy to guess how likely other readers would like to see a post, but it’s pretty easy to use the site in a way that just ignores that (say by using the All Posts page).
So why does it matter if the voting is bad at measuring things you consider important? Which is really just asking, why should we prefer to be better at measuring whatever it is you would like us to measure (seems you want something like “higher score = more true”)?
I mean that seriously. If you want the voting to be different, it’s not enough to say you don’t like it and that it’s status oriented (and most of this post reads to me like complaining the votes to status mapping today doesn’t match your desired mapping, which is just its own meta-status play). You’ve got to make a persuasive bid that the thing you want voting to track instead is better than whatever is happening today and then downstream from that propose a mechanism (ideally by explaining how the gears of it will get you what you want). Instead you’ve given us a kind of outline with all the essential details missing or implied.
The point of LessWrong is to refine the art of rationality. All structure of the site should be pointed toward that goal. This structure points directly away from that goal.
I don’t think you’ve established that “this structure points directly away from that goal”.
Your thesis (if I’m understanding it right) is that weighted voting increases the role of “social proof”, which will be bad to whatever extent (1) valuable outside perspectives are getting drowned by less-valuable[1] insider-approved posts and/or (2) the highest-karma users have systematically worse judgement than lower-karma users do. This trades off against (2′) whatever tendency there may be for the highest-karma users to have better judgement. (Almost-equivalently: for people with better judgement to get higher karma.)
If 2′ is a real thing (which it seems to me one should certainly expect), simply saying “social proof is a bad thing” isn’t enough to indicate that weighted voting is bad. The badness of giving more weight to something akin to status could be outweighed by the goodness of improving the SNR in estimates of post quality.
You haven’t provided any evidence that either 1 or 2 is actually happening. You’ve said that you think the content here is of low quality, but that’s not (directly) the relevant question; it could be that the content here is of low quality but weighted voting is actually helping the situation by keeping outright junk less prominent.
My guess is that if you’re right about the quality being low, the primary reason isn’t poor selection, or poor incentives, but simply that the people here aren’t, in aggregate, sufficiently good at having and refining good ideas; and that the main effect of removing weighted voting would be to make the overall quality a bit worse. I could of course be wrong, but so far as I can tell my guess is a plausible one; do you have evidence that it’s wrong?
[1] Less valuable in context. Outside stuff of slightly lower quality that provides greater diversity of opinions could be more valuable on net, for instance.
As I see it, voting on LessWrong isn’t directly a measure of anything other than how much other readers on LessWrong chose to click the upvote and downvote buttons. It gets used by the site as a proxy to guess how likely other readers would like to see a post, but it’s pretty easy to use the site in a way that just ignores that (say by using the All Posts page).
So why does it matter if the voting is bad at measuring things you consider important? Which is really just asking, why should we prefer to be better at measuring whatever it is you would like us to measure (seems you want something like “higher score = more true”)?
I mean that seriously. If you want the voting to be different, it’s not enough to say you don’t like it and that it’s status oriented (and most of this post reads to me like complaining the votes to status mapping today doesn’t match your desired mapping, which is just its own meta-status play). You’ve got to make a persuasive bid that the thing you want voting to track instead is better than whatever is happening today and then downstream from that propose a mechanism (ideally by explaining how the gears of it will get you what you want). Instead you’ve given us a kind of outline with all the essential details missing or implied.
The point of LessWrong is to refine the art of rationality. All structure of the site should be pointed toward that goal. This structure points directly away from that goal.
I don’t think you’ve established that “this structure points directly away from that goal”.
Your thesis (if I’m understanding it right) is that weighted voting increases the role of “social proof”, which will be bad to whatever extent (1) valuable outside perspectives are getting drowned by less-valuable[1] insider-approved posts and/or (2) the highest-karma users have systematically worse judgement than lower-karma users do. This trades off against (2′) whatever tendency there may be for the highest-karma users to have better judgement. (Almost-equivalently: for people with better judgement to get higher karma.)
If 2′ is a real thing (which it seems to me one should certainly expect), simply saying “social proof is a bad thing” isn’t enough to indicate that weighted voting is bad. The badness of giving more weight to something akin to status could be outweighed by the goodness of improving the SNR in estimates of post quality.
You haven’t provided any evidence that either 1 or 2 is actually happening. You’ve said that you think the content here is of low quality, but that’s not (directly) the relevant question; it could be that the content here is of low quality but weighted voting is actually helping the situation by keeping outright junk less prominent.
My guess is that if you’re right about the quality being low, the primary reason isn’t poor selection, or poor incentives, but simply that the people here aren’t, in aggregate, sufficiently good at having and refining good ideas; and that the main effect of removing weighted voting would be to make the overall quality a bit worse. I could of course be wrong, but so far as I can tell my guess is a plausible one; do you have evidence that it’s wrong?
[1] Less valuable in context. Outside stuff of slightly lower quality that provides greater diversity of opinions could be more valuable on net, for instance.