The most interesting thing you said is left to your footnote:
The ratio of “total karma of people banned from commenting on ‘Basics of Rationalist Discourse’” to “karma of author of ‘Basics of Rationalist Discourse’” is approximately 3:1.
I would love to see if this pattern is also present in other posts.
There should be some mechanism to judge posts / comments that have a mix of good and bad karma, especially since there are two measures of this now. In the olden-days it still would have been possible to do, since an overall score of “0” could still be a very high-quality information signal, if the total number of votes is high. This is only even more the case now.
Indeed, the more people[1] are banned from commenting on the norms as a consequence of their criticism of said norms, the less we should believe that the norms are any good!
At issue is whether low-quality debate is ever fruitful. That piece of data in your footnote suggests that the issue might instead be whether or not there even is low-quality debate, or at least whether or not we can rely on moderators’ judgement calls or the sum of all (weighted) votes to make such calls.
That piece of data in your footnote suggests that the issue might instead be whether or not there even is low-quality debate, or at least whether or not we can rely on moderators’ judgement calls or the sum of all (weighted) votes to make such calls.
Certainly we can’t rely on the judgment of post authors! (And I am not even talking about this case in particular, but—just in general, for post authors to have the power to make such calls introduces a massive conflict of interest, and incentivizes ego-driven cognitive distortions. This is why the “post authors can ban people from their posts” feature is so corrosive to anything resembling good and useful discussion… truly, it seems to me like an egregious, and entirely unforced, mistake in system design.)
The mistake in system design started with the implementation of downvoting, but I have more complicated reasoning for this. If you have a system that implements downvoting, the reason for having that feature in place is to prevent ideas that are not easily argued away from being repeated. I tend to be skeptical of such systems because I tend to believe that if ideas are not easily argued away, they are more likely to have merit to them. If you have a post which argues for the enforcement of certain norms which push down specific kinds of ideas that are hard to argue away, one of which is the very idea that this ought to be done, it creates the impression that there are certain dogmas which can no longer be defended in open dialogue.
I am not sure that I’d go quite that far, but I certainly sympathize with the sentiment.
If you have a post which argues for the enforcement of certain norms which push down specific kinds of ideas that are hard to argue away, one of which is the very idea that this ought to be done, it creates the impression that there are certain dogmas which can no longer be defended in open dialogue.
The most interesting thing you said is left to your footnote:
I would love to see if this pattern is also present in other posts.
There should be some mechanism to judge posts / comments that have a mix of good and bad karma, especially since there are two measures of this now. In the olden-days it still would have been possible to do, since an overall score of “0” could still be a very high-quality information signal, if the total number of votes is high. This is only even more the case now.
At issue is whether low-quality debate is ever fruitful. That piece of data in your footnote suggests that the issue might instead be whether or not there even is low-quality debate, or at least whether or not we can rely on moderators’ judgement calls or the sum of all (weighted) votes to make such calls.
Certainly we can’t rely on the judgment of post authors! (And I am not even talking about this case in particular, but—just in general, for post authors to have the power to make such calls introduces a massive conflict of interest, and incentivizes ego-driven cognitive distortions. This is why the “post authors can ban people from their posts” feature is so corrosive to anything resembling good and useful discussion… truly, it seems to me like an egregious, and entirely unforced, mistake in system design.)
The mistake in system design started with the implementation of downvoting, but I have more complicated reasoning for this. If you have a system that implements downvoting, the reason for having that feature in place is to prevent ideas that are not easily argued away from being repeated. I tend to be skeptical of such systems because I tend to believe that if ideas are not easily argued away, they are more likely to have merit to them. If you have a post which argues for the enforcement of certain norms which push down specific kinds of ideas that are hard to argue away, one of which is the very idea that this ought to be done, it creates the impression that there are certain dogmas which can no longer be defended in open dialogue.
I am not sure that I’d go quite that far, but I certainly sympathize with the sentiment.
And with this, I entirely agree.