Most comments show exactly one downvote without a clear pattern why. I’d guess that a single person downvoted all these short comments. Can it be that this user doesn’t know the custom of upvoting survey-takers?
ADDED 2014-10-25T16:20 UTC: The single downvotes disappeared.
ADDED 2014-10-26T21:10 UTC: The single downvotes reappeared again (at least for a lot of high scoring comments).
Doesn’t know? Of course said user knows. Do you think there’s someone going “Um, lots of upvotes here? I have no idea why, so I better downvote each one.”? It’s someone who doesn’t agree / care for the custom. Probably some crooked man, and not of the Scottish General variety (generally, no true Scottish General).
Edit: Don’t know who, if it’s considered against any unwritten rules, it should be easy to find out who it was.
Sorry, it was through no fault of your own. The “crooked man” (stand-in for villain) reminded me of the “There Was a Crooked Man” nursery rhyme. The (short) wiki article should explain the rest.
Other than the riff on the No True Scotsman, since indeed the kind of people downvoting others generally consider themselves to be the “true LessWrongers”, or so I’d surmise. It was just a throwaway thought, thanks for inquiring :-).
It is interesting in kind of the same way that some people have quite a lot more up-votes than the others. The same threshold preventing downvotes prevents upvotes below.
Gwern (79) and Vaniver (66) show significantly more upvotes than the next in line (gwern was initially also one of those who didn’t get a downvote when the others did). If upvotes are handed out according to the rule and logically in order of occurrence the vots should roughly read n, n-1, n-2, … but they don’t. Quite some people upvote only their favorite LWers. A little bit of coalition politics or fan-boying on LW after all.
Gwern (79) and Vaniver (66) show significantly more upvotes than the next in line
That is interesting! I think some of Gwern’s upvotes are coming from people who agree with his “Basilisk” comment / found it because of the discussion it generated, but I suspect the two of us are having some sort of name recognition effect. For everyone else it does look roughly like people upvoting everyone who took the survey the last time they checked: before writing this comment, I’d upvoted everyone before 3:30am server time on the 26th, but it seems like those before and after that line are both about low 30s. I think there’s also a factor of people not loading all the comments- otherwise we wouldn’t expect the oldest comment to be lower than the early bulk of comments.
That is interesting! I think some of Gwern’s upvotes are coming from people who agree with his “Basilisk” comment / found it because of the discussion it generated
It didn’t seem self-evident to me that his mention of the basilisk would help his comment’s score overall. I don’t personally believe in the basilisk and I do think it would make an interesting survey question, but I thought many LWers considered it a dangerous idea to discuss? They may think that even if they don’t believe in it either. Or maybe Eliezer was just weird in his reaction to it. Judging based on Gwern’s comment’s 99% positive rating, that’s certainly what it looks like.
I think there’s also a factor of people not loading all the comments- otherwise we wouldn’t expect the oldest comment to be lower than the early bulk of comments.
It’s not so far off that I feel the difference can simply be attributed to people not loading all the comments. At the time of my writing this, the oldest comment has the same score as the third and fourth comments.
Gwern (79) and Vaniver (66) show significantly more upvotes than the next in line
Thanks. That’s interesting. I hadn’t noticed that. They even score higher than some people who posted earlier, and with similar quality posts.
If upvotes are handed out according to the rule and logically in order of occurrence the vots should roughly read n, n-1, n-2,
...At first I was going to say I think it would be more of an exponential decrease since most people take the survey in the first few days and I doubt many people diligently keep track of new comments, but then I remembered that the rate of new “I took the survey” comments themselves decrease exponentially, probably at a similar rate, which cancels out much of the effect. Oh well. This does make the situation less unfair.
At first I thought this person would only downvote short comments that have little content beyond saying that the user took the survey, but I’ve since noticed that even “I took the survey” comments with very detailed critiques are getting the single downvotes. My guess is this person doesn’t like the idea of some people getting 100% positive ratings through posting only survey comments, as survey comments would be the easiest way to attain that otherwise, or thinks that the amount of karma awarded by other users for these comments (even the detailed ones) is too much, and that karma should mainly be reserved for quality discussions.
Personally I think the amount of karma awarded for the short and simple survey comments should be based on the difficulty, time commitment, and benefit from having people take these surveys, but I think the amount of karma being awarded already is in line with that. Sure, there might be a few people lying by saying they took the survey when they in fact didn’t, but I suspect that’s pretty rare. I would like it though if there were some users who prioritized quality in deciding whether to upvote comments, so that it would be easier for people to quickly locate the most useful comments when they choose the “Sort by: Best” option.
I’ve been doing that too actually, although I am somewhat tempted to upvote some of the recent survey-takers just to make the playing field more equal for people whose other time commitments made them unable to take the survey very early.
I thought about suggesting to Yvain to edit his post by including a suggestion for people who have finished the survey to check back again later to upvote new survey-takers, but I get the impression he may prefer having this incentive against people procrastinating on taking the survey. It does at least mean that on average, the more heavily involved LWers are going to be awarded more karma since they’re more likely to notice the survey as soon as it’s posted.
This however has to be weighed against the disincentive for latecomers to take the survey if they didn’t see or were otherwise unable to take the survey early. (Yvain has also on occasion made little changes to the survey after it’s been posted, but I don’t think that’s enough to be a good incentive to take it later.)
(Yvain has also on occasion made little changes to the survey after it’s been posted, but I don’t think that’s enough to be a good incentive to take it later.)
Most comments show exactly one downvote without a clear pattern why. I’d guess that a single person downvoted all these short comments. Can it be that this user doesn’t know the custom of upvoting survey-takers?
ADDED 2014-10-25T16:20 UTC: The single downvotes disappeared.
ADDED 2014-10-26T21:10 UTC: The single downvotes reappeared again (at least for a lot of high scoring comments).
Or disagrees with it.
Doesn’t know? Of course said user knows. Do you think there’s someone going “Um, lots of upvotes here? I have no idea why, so I better downvote each one.”? It’s someone who doesn’t agree / care for the custom. Probably some crooked man, and not of the Scottish General variety (generally, no true Scottish General).
Edit: Don’t know who, if it’s considered against any unwritten rules, it should be easy to find out who it was.
This sentence is utterly impenetrable to me, and googling turns up nothing relevant. My curiosity is piqued—would you mind explaining a bit?
Sorry, it was through no fault of your own. The “crooked man” (stand-in for villain) reminded me of the “There Was a Crooked Man” nursery rhyme. The (short) wiki article should explain the rest.
Other than the riff on the No True Scotsman, since indeed the kind of people downvoting others generally consider themselves to be the “true LessWrongers”, or so I’d surmise. It was just a throwaway thought, thanks for inquiring :-).
Same happened last year.
Almost everyone has a downvote again. What’s more interesting is the short list of people who don’t…
It is interesting in kind of the same way that some people have quite a lot more up-votes than the others. The same threshold preventing downvotes prevents upvotes below.
I’m not sure I understand. I wasn’t able to find explanations by typing “upvote” into the search either. Can you please clarify?
Gwern (79) and Vaniver (66) show significantly more upvotes than the next in line (gwern was initially also one of those who didn’t get a downvote when the others did). If upvotes are handed out according to the rule and logically in order of occurrence the vots should roughly read n, n-1, n-2, … but they don’t. Quite some people upvote only their favorite LWers. A little bit of coalition politics or fan-boying on LW after all.
That is interesting! I think some of Gwern’s upvotes are coming from people who agree with his “Basilisk” comment / found it because of the discussion it generated, but I suspect the two of us are having some sort of name recognition effect. For everyone else it does look roughly like people upvoting everyone who took the survey the last time they checked: before writing this comment, I’d upvoted everyone before 3:30am server time on the 26th, but it seems like those before and after that line are both about low 30s. I think there’s also a factor of people not loading all the comments- otherwise we wouldn’t expect the oldest comment to be lower than the early bulk of comments.
It didn’t seem self-evident to me that his mention of the basilisk would help his comment’s score overall. I don’t personally believe in the basilisk and I do think it would make an interesting survey question, but I thought many LWers considered it a dangerous idea to discuss? They may think that even if they don’t believe in it either. Or maybe Eliezer was just weird in his reaction to it. Judging based on Gwern’s comment’s 99% positive rating, that’s certainly what it looks like.
It’s not so far off that I feel the difference can simply be attributed to people not loading all the comments. At the time of my writing this, the oldest comment has the same score as the third and fourth comments.
Thanks. That’s interesting. I hadn’t noticed that. They even score higher than some people who posted earlier, and with similar quality posts.
...At first I was going to say I think it would be more of an exponential decrease since most people take the survey in the first few days and I doubt many people diligently keep track of new comments, but then I remembered that the rate of new “I took the survey” comments themselves decrease exponentially, probably at a similar rate, which cancels out much of the effect. Oh well. This does make the situation less unfair.
At first I thought this person would only downvote short comments that have little content beyond saying that the user took the survey, but I’ve since noticed that even “I took the survey” comments with very detailed critiques are getting the single downvotes. My guess is this person doesn’t like the idea of some people getting 100% positive ratings through posting only survey comments, as survey comments would be the easiest way to attain that otherwise, or thinks that the amount of karma awarded by other users for these comments (even the detailed ones) is too much, and that karma should mainly be reserved for quality discussions.
Personally I think the amount of karma awarded for the short and simple survey comments should be based on the difficulty, time commitment, and benefit from having people take these surveys, but I think the amount of karma being awarded already is in line with that. Sure, there might be a few people lying by saying they took the survey when they in fact didn’t, but I suspect that’s pretty rare. I would like it though if there were some users who prioritized quality in deciding whether to upvote comments, so that it would be easier for people to quickly locate the most useful comments when they choose the “Sort by: Best” option.
That’s what I’ve been doing: voting as I normally do, based on quality, regardless of tradition.
I’ve been doing that too actually, although I am somewhat tempted to upvote some of the recent survey-takers just to make the playing field more equal for people whose other time commitments made them unable to take the survey very early.
I thought about suggesting to Yvain to edit his post by including a suggestion for people who have finished the survey to check back again later to upvote new survey-takers, but I get the impression he may prefer having this incentive against people procrastinating on taking the survey. It does at least mean that on average, the more heavily involved LWers are going to be awarded more karma since they’re more likely to notice the survey as soon as it’s posted.
This however has to be weighed against the disincentive for latecomers to take the survey if they didn’t see or were otherwise unable to take the survey early. (Yvain has also on occasion made little changes to the survey after it’s been posted, but I don’t think that’s enough to be a good incentive to take it later.)
I’m strongly considering it for next year.
From what people have said, it seems that after the survey was posted a new question was added about our favorite LW post. Were there any others?
I really want to know this, and maybe you should make it a top-level comment. (Or maybe I should.)
I feel cheated by taking it as soon as I saw it.
Done.