I was just thinking how there’s a weird hivemind thing going on with the downvotes. Well-written and cordial posts arguing against the site’s preferred positions are being summarily downvoted to invisibility.
This doesn’t look like a very healthy discussion dynamic.
I have been using the Kibitzer since I started posting, and my handle on this matter is that well-written, cordial posts that don’t use LW techniques are downvoted. That is, they argue against the preferred position, and they are downvoted because they argue badly. Small corroborations: the posts that get summarily upvoted are ones that point out lack-of-rationality in the arguments, upvotes on topics when they aren’t flawed.
If that seems like an unhealthy discussion dynamic then you should review the LW techniques for rationality and make a top level post explaining how using these techniques, or how requiring everyone to use these techniques, could result in unhealthy discussions.
Possibility: Well-written, cordial posts are your criteria for upvotes because cordiality and well-writtenness usually correlate with clear thinking and good reasoning. This is true over most of the blog, except for the edge cases. These cases have their roots in subtle cognitive biases, not gross emotional biases, and it’s possible that lack of writing skill and cordiality points out gross emotional biases but not subtler ones.
What exactly do you mean by groupthink? Let’s taboo the word a bit:
All members of group agree (same answer)
All members of group have same/similar thought process (same process to answer)
Answers or processes are flawed (this could just be a common mistake)
Flaws are not corrected because group consensus is more important (this is the bit that distinguishes groupthink from a common mistake, it perpetuates)
Those last two are important parts of groupthink. Without that last one, mathematicians are guilty of groupthink, because they all apply the same (somtimes flawed) processes and get the same answers. Maths isn’t groupthink because attempts are made to discover and fix flaws, and these attempts aren’t ignored out of hand.
The kibitzer blocks out names and karma scores; so you can’t tell what the group consensus is (either by the person’s name; “the community thinks this guy is a troll” or by vote; “-5? this post must be bad”). I follow the same process as everyone else in evaluating a comment, but I don’t know if I’ve gotten the same answer as them. In practice, when I’ve checked, I do get the same answer, so it satisfies the first two conditions. But is the process flawed? And is meeting the group’s consensus more important than fixing these flaws?
I think I feel the problem is more a mismatch between the subtlety of the problem and the bluntness of the tool. Downvotes are a harsh and low-signal way of pointing problems in arguments, and seem more suited to punishing comments which can be identified as crap at a glance. Since this site isn’t doing the free-for-all comedy club thing Slashdot and Reddit have going, I’m not sure that the downvote mechanic quite belongs here to begin with. Users posting downright nonsense and noise don’t even belong on the site, and bad arguments can be ignored or addressed instead of just anonymously downvoting them.
And yes, this probably should go to a toplevel post, but I don’t have the energy for that scale of meta-discussion right now.
Users posting downright nonsense and noise don’t even belong on the site, and bad arguments can be ignored or addressed instead of just anonymously downvoting them.
Downvoting mechanism is one way of making sure that obvious nonsense-posting gets visibly and quickly discouraged. Without it, there would be more nonsense.
I don’t think that’s actually true. There are very few nonsense posts (or at least, very few that get voted down); and when there are, downvoting doesn’t always discourage the poster. When I see a post with a negative score, it’s more often one that is controversial, or that disagrees with LessWrong dogma, or that was made by someone unpopular here, or that is in the middle of a flamewar between two users, or that is part of a longer conversation where one poster has triggered an “omega wolf” reaction from the rest of the pack by acting conciliatory.
Downvoting wrong comments may be harsh for the person being downvoted, but hopefully in the long run it can encourage better comments, or at least make it easier to find good comments.
There may be some flaws in the karma system or the way it’s used by the community, but I don’t see any obvious improvements, or any other systems that would obviously work better.
Look at mwaser: he complains a lot about being downvoted, but he also got a lot of feedback for what people found lacking in his post. Yes, a portion of the downvotes he gets may be due to factors unrelated to the quality of his arguments (he repeatedly promotes his own blog, and complains about the downvotes being a proof of community irrationality—both can get under people’s skin), which is a bit unfortunate, but not a fatal flaw of the karma system.
Look at mwaser: he complains a lot about being downvoted, but he also got a lot of feedback for what people found lacking in his post. Yes, a portion of the downvotes he gets may be due to factors unrelated to the quality of his arguments (he repeatedly promotes his own blog, and complains about the downvotes being a proof of community irrationality—both can get under people’s skin), which is a bit unfortunate, but not a fatal flaw of the karma system.
I did. The feedback that actually told him something came as replies. I’m not seeing how the use of downvotes actually helped there, and it did seem to add unnecessary nastiness to the exchange.
I agree it’s a bit harsh, and not always useful. It’s a bit of a pity that the karma system doesn’t allow to make a difference between “5 people found this post not-that-great” and “5 people found this post absolutely terrible”.
Maybe it would be nice to have a system that would allow for more nuance, but it would also have to be easy enough to understand and use, and not be easy to game.
Also, I would say that the downvotes did have some utility, by expressing “you should pay more attention to criticism, most people here disagree with you”.
Maybe it would be nice to have a system that would allow for more nuance, but it would also have to be easy enough to understand and use, and not be easy to game.
What about the ability to mark a comment as obsolete if you changed your mind? It will then be under the fold but people won’t be able to downvote it anymore. Or should people who changed their mind be punished infinitely? I noticed that I often delete comments that get downvoted if I changed my mind, e.g. understood where I was wrong, because they keep getting downvoted long after the discussion ended. By deleting it I destroy the context and consistency of the discussion. But I also do not want to be downvoted anymore for something I don’t believe and I want to signal that I changed my mind.
People here tend to reward humility vigorously. (Humility including the strong non-submissive kind that doesn’t base the ego on attachment to being right, not just signals of lower status.)
As Richard suggests editing your comment, leaving the original while adding a retraction is a good idea (and somewhat of a convention). You can make it bold by using two asterices on both sides.
It is also worth adding a reply later on in the discussion explaining your new position and why you changed it. Unless I confuse you with someone else (quite possible) I think I recall you once before changing your mind and acknowleding it publicly. By reading that I gained a lot of respect for your judgement (or that of whoever else it was if I mistake your identity).
Not a bad idea; having all votes public may also be an improvement.
Still, I suspect that whatever the system, there would be someone to argue that it sucks, which isnt’t an excuse to not improve it, but a reason to be cautious.
having all votes public may also be an improvement.
The purpose of implementing voting, as opposed to (for example) soliciting critical/praising comments, is to get more information about people’s attitude towards individual comments, by lifting reasons not to signal (and thus lock the community focus better, protecting it from watering down). Commenting would be less frequent because (1) it’s more difficult to comment; (2) if you have little to say, or what you’d say has already been said, you don’t want to create more noise.
Requiring that votes are made public will discourage some of the voters from signaling their attitude, or otherwise distort the signal for image purposes. I’m not even sure whether voluntary public voting is a good idea, because of the image-driven distortion effect, but since it’s presumably no worse than with commenting, it might not be that bad.
Not a bad idea; having all votes public may also be an improvement.
I will oppose that option for as long as I have breath. If it is implemented then I recommend to all participants that they find a way to game that system so as to minimize the damage.
(I’ll not repeat the reasons here but I have mentioned them previously.)
Metafilter has a pretty simple system. Users can favorite posts and comments. The favorite count and the names of the favoriters are public. There are no corresponding unfavorites. Instead, the users may silently flag the post, indicating that it seems to be bad enough that a moderator should probably take a look. The moderators clean up crap comments manually, guided by the flags.
I haven’t read the above thread. But here’s an idea I had about the Karma system: If you want to downvote someone you’re asked to provide a reply explaining why you downvoted the comment. If you downvote 5 times without explaining yourself you’ll lose 1 Karma point.
It always really bothers me if I get downvoted without getting feedback because without feedback I’m unable to improve, refine my writing skills or rationality. What’s the point then? Merely losing Karma score will led people to conclude (unjustified) that they are downvoted for various reasons but not that they may be wrong or that their comment simply does not add anything valuable to the debate. Negative Karma without feedback causes resentment in all people except those who already acquired enough rationality skills and realization to infer that there might be something wrong with their comment and not with the person downvoting it. The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers and make them conclude that LW is merely an echo-chamber and does not tolerate their precious critique.
It always really bothers me if I get downvoted without getting feedback. … The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers and make them conclude that LW is merely an echo-chamber and does not tolerate their precious critique.
I felt the same way when I first started posting here. Particularly when I was challenging the local conventional wisdom. But now I realize that anonymous unexplained downvotes are a form of feedback, and a particularly valuable form of feedback to someone prepared to take advantage of it.
Because feedback in the form of comments simply provokes an automatic verbal response from you. You learn nothing from the experience. You just get some practice at constructing rationalizations. But feedback in the form of anonymous downvotes forces you to stop and reflect: Just what does this mean? What do I need to change so as to prevent this? What experiments should I undertake?”
ETA:
Negative Karma without feedback causes resentment in all people except those who already acquired enough rationality skills and realization to infer that there might be something wrong with their comment and not with the person downvoting it. The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers …
A good point. So for LW regulars, it may be worth remembering that it is more informative to upvote explicit criticism of newbie mistakes than to downvote the mistakes themselves.
So for LW regulars, it may be worth remembering that it is more informative to upvote explicit criticism of newbie mistakes than to downvote the mistakes themselves.
A good suggestion. I expect whether I follow it or not will depend on how arrogant the newbie is. Unless, of course the explicit criticism is ‘you are being arrogant and annoying. We are more fussy about that sort of thing here than in many other places on the internet’. Then I suppose the same principle would apply. :)
But now I realize that anonymous unexplained downvotes are a form of feedback, and a particularly valuable form of feedback to someone prepared to take advantage of it.
But if you were posting a comment about cooking wouldn’t you weigh the Karma of a chef differently than that of someone who has merely joint your culinary community to read up on some recipe?
But feedback in the form of anonymous downvotes forces you to stop and reflect: Just what does this mean? What do I need to change so as to prevent this? What experiments should I undertake?”
I don’t expect most of all people to conclude this naturally. I believe there is some evidence for this, as for example this Wiki entry states:
It’s unclear whether Descartes, Spinoza or Leibniz would have lasted a day without being voted down into oblivion.
And that is actually from a ‘Rationality Wiki’, so what might John Doe conclude?
It’s unclear whether Descartes, Spinoza or Leibniz would have lasted a day without being voted down into oblivion.
I loved that line. It was put in there among ‘the ugly’ but I consider it one of the best features of lesswrong. Just because they talk about some guy in high school doesn’t mean their thinking is any good! Eat downvote burn until your thinking gets up to scratch Descartes. Read the damn sequences!
(I wonder if Descartes would end up getting into arguments with Mitchell… “I thought I was me, I still think I’m me, therefore I am still me!”)
But if you were posting a comment about cooking wouldn’t you weigh the Karma of a chef differently than that of someone who has merely joint your culinary community to read up on some recipe?
My experience with comments has been that it is wisest to ignore the reputation of the source and simply focus on the words. (One exception: interpreting irony).
So I doubt that knowing the source of up- and down- votes would be particularly useful either. If I know that a great chef has downvoted my chili recipe, I still don’t know whether it is because he doesn’t like my spelling, doesn’t like my ingredients, or simply doesn’t care for chili.
If a chef downvotes your chili recipe, it could be because he doesn’t like your spelling, your ingredients, or chili.
If a random person downvotes your chili recipe, it could also be because she doesn’t like your spelling, your ingredients, or chili.
The first downvote is still more informative even given any particular reason for downvoting, because the chef is more likely than a random person to know how to spell “roux”, cook a perfect pot of pinto beans, or have good reasons to dislike chili as a class of food (e.g. “tried seven versions, don’t like any” v. “had it when I was a kid and didn’t like it”).
I personally believe I am usually better off not knowing who downvoted me. Quite often (although not always) when people downvote my comments I hold their judgement in contempt. This includes those comments that receive initial downvotes but rebound to become significantly positive once the better (and less impassioned) judgement of the broader community sets in.
If the comments justifying their downvote disgust me then I just end up losing respect for the individual. Since it isn’t all that much of a benefit to me to know who has objectionable judgement in such matters and it is far more pleasant to converse with people I respect I prefer to not know.
(Oh, and if I had to comment every time I downvoted things would get downright spammy!)
Negative Karma without feedback causes resentment in all people except those who already acquired enough rationality skills and realization to infer that there might be something wrong with their comment and not with the person downvoting it. The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers and make them conclude that LW is merely an echo-chamber and does not tolerate their precious critique.
This is a very good point. I upvoted your comment for this point even though I don’t believe your suggestion would work well as a general practice. I agree that there are times when explanations are beneficial and in the case of new users this is definitely something to remember.
Example—while I was writing this my previous comment went to −1. This is not a big deal at all and nor is it particularly surprising. But all the same I am glad I don’t know who the culprit was (‘culprit’ framing intended to convey perspective) and have no difficulty at all in inferring either what their actual motivations likely are or what reasons they would actually express.
The mere fact of a downvote is of some use to me in as much as it informs me that it is a topic on which it will be beneficial to me to replace personal sincerity with political optimisation. ie. Use the kind of language that makes critics look bad for criticizing (instead of casually leaving a wide open target). Present whatever statements are most likely to achieve a desired outcome rather than just saying what I believe.
I don’t think anyone would benefit if someone went and justified their voting decision and I would be surprised if I found it much more informative than the integer representation.
EDIT: While I was writing this comment the ‘-1’ in question changed to ‘+2’. That did surprise me!
I’m aware that you do not support making votes public, so forcing people to comment is something you don’t support either. I haven’t read up on your reasons yet. But consider that as any community grows more popular the number of people that do not indentify with its motto will grow too. This might ultimately result in a reputation system that does not reflect the base and therefore the intended standards of the community, in this case the refinement of rationality. More so if the number of people previously equipped with the sufficient skills required in any given community is very low. And for those reasons I believe that making votes public gives people a chance to spot unreasonable votes based on differing matters of taste or bias.
Any resentment is better directed at certain individuals, as you are able to inquire about their reasons, than the community as a whole, as people will rather just leave.
The biggest downside I see to public voting would be the emergence of a pattern of reciprocity—both “you downvoted my post, so I’ll downvote yours” and “you upvoted my post, so I’ll upvote yours”.
Any resentment is better directed at certain individuals, as you are able to inquire about their reasons, than the community as a whole, as people will rather just leave.
I don’t think so -- 10 downvotes from one single individual is much harder to forget than 10 downvotes from the community in general. 100 downvotes from the community in general might make you want to leave, but 100 downvotes from a single guy might have the same effect too (and you’ll start hating him way before that).
I’m aware that you do not support making votes public, so forcing people to comment is something you don’t support either.
I suppose it does at that. Although I note that I wouldn’t like explanations to be forced even if comments are public. The main reason is that it makes things more personal and emphasizes disagreement. I also anticipate that I will quite often not believe the explanation! People’s justifications for their opinions and particularly their social judgments are generated by a different mechanism to what gives them that opinion. The question “is that their excuse or their real reason?” will always apply and quite often warrant the answer ‘excuse’.
This might ultimately result in a reputation system that does not reflect the base and therefore the intended standards of the community, in this case the refinement of rationality.
But consider that as any community grows more popular the number of people that do not indentify with its motto will grow too.
What do you suggest I do to discourage this? ;)
(I note that it is also likely true that the number of people who agree with me may increase too, particularly if it is a position I expect people to appreciate more as they gain a more sophisticated grasp of lesswrong social dynamics.)
More so if the number of people previously equipped with the sufficient skills required in any given community is very low.
Errr.… that seems to suggest that-which-is-lesswrong has already been lost!
And for those reasons I believe that making votes public gives people a chance to spot unreasonable votes based on differing matters of taste or bias.
Err… that isn’t ‘for those reasons’ so much as it is an independent point. But it is a good point and something that would be the most prominent advantage to sacrificing anonymity. For related reasons some forums make the karma impact of votes dependent on the karma of the voter (stepped approximately logarithmically proportional).
A possible alternative is to have only manually approved voters (like moderators, but more numerous), with other things staying the same. Requiring commenting is not a good option.
Slightly OT, but it might be wise to have some sort of automatic limit on voting too often just after acquiring an account here. If LW should happen to attract the negative attention of Pharyngula, or the chan hordes, or the Conservapedia crowd, or yaoi fangirls, or tea partiers, or some other populous constituency, they could vote each other up in karma and then be pretty disruptive.
That’s mostly a community reanimation measure. If quality of voting merely starts to deteriorate, a moderate karma cutoff that enables voting might do the trick.
I’d like to see total upvotes and downvotes, not just the sum.
I thought for a minute that votes made using the kibitzer could count for more. But this would be a feature that would favor dishonest users (who could game it) over honest users.
A notion for a slightly more informative karma system. Each person can apply 1, 2, or 3 karma points (plus or minus).
Instead of just giving the number of points, the slot after the date has total points, number of plus points, number of minus points, and number of voters.
I realize there’s a little redundancy, but I think that would be alright to make it more convenient for anyone who doesn’t want to be constantly doing routine arithmetic.
The idea would probably be a little graph showing point accumulation over time, but that seems like too much added work for the site.
I’ve never made the claim that the downvotes are “proof” of community irrationality. In fact, given what I believe to be the community’s goals, I see them as entirely rational.
I have claimed that certain upvotes are irrational (i.e. those without any substance). The consensus reply seems to be that they still fulfill a purpose/goal for a large percentage of the regulars here. By definition, that makes those upvotes rational (yes, I AM reversing my stand on that issue because I have been “educated” on what the community’s goals apparently are)..
I am very appreciative of the replies that have substance. I am currently of the opinion, however, that the karma system actually reduces the amount of replies since it allows someone to be easily and anonymously dismissed without good arguments/cause.
By curiosity, what do you consider to be the community’s goals?
I am currently of the opinion, however, that the karma system actually reduces the amount of replies since it allows someone to be easily and anonymously dismissed without good arguments/cause.
1) In itself, reducing the amount of replies is a feature, not a bug; I expect most readers would prefer few comments of high quality than many comments of varying quality.
2) the only instances of ’someone being dismissed without good arguments/cause” have been obvious spam and cranks. I don’t think it’s a fair description of the reaction to your comments, however; you’ve had plenty of detailed criticism.
The stated goal of the community is to refine the art of human rationality. Unfortunately, rationality is an instrumental goal dependent upon the next-level-up or terminal goal. Most people, including me (initially, at least), assume that the next goal up is logical argumentation or discovery of how to reason better.
Most of the practices here are rational in terms of a specific individual’s goals (mostly in terms of maintaining beliefs) but are strictly contrary to good argumentation techniques. The number of ridiculous strawmen, arguments by authority, arguments by pointing to something long and rambling that has nothing to do with the initial argument, etc. is nothing short of overwhelming.
So the next goal up clearly isn’t rational argumentation. Assuming that it was was the mistake that I made in the post Irrational Upvotes (and why I subsequently retracted my stand that they were irrational). They are rational in relation to another goal. My error was in my assumption of the goal.
One of Eliezer’s main points is learning how to learn where you go wrong. This community is far worse at that than most I’ve seen. Y’all know how to argue/debate “logically” much better—but it’s normally to the purpose of retaining your views, not discovering where you might have gone wrong or where you might do better.
(I’ll cover 1 and 2 in subsequent comments—thanks for a high-quality response)
the number of ridiculous strawmen, arguments by authority, arguments by pointing to something long and rambling that has nothing to do with the initial argument, etc. is nothing short of overwhelming.
Some things to consider on these points (mostly because I have not noticed a prevalence of these issues)
Strawmen. If, at point X, Y looks like a strawman of a position, then at point Y, X will look like a strawman. I think. If that’s the case, it could be that many of us are at point X (LW rationality techniques, etc) and you are at point Y—making valid, credible arguments that we are countering with strawmen, as it were.
Arguments by authority. A hallmark of LessWrong is linking back to the sequences or to other posts; this could very easily look like we are saying “Eliezer said that’s not the case”. We aren’t; he just produced a very good explanation of why it isn’t the case, and it’s easier to link to that explanation rather than fumble through our own duplication. Another point is that the average LWer is far more capable of deferring to people they know to be often correct—their judgement as a Bayesian reasoner is itself evidence. This looks even more like argument from authority, but there are subtle differences.
Links to long, rambling segues that aren’t related. They are related, mostly. A combination of decompartmentalised thinking, skill with readily drawing analogies, and skill with (very) long inferential distances can produce relationships that seem bizarre or unlikely.
Lastly, this comment:
it’s normally to the purpose of retaining your views, not discovering where you might have gone wrong or where you might do better.
is definitely a concern for ALL LWers. I suspect you have stumbled onto a case analogous to theism: it is not the case that we wish to retain our atheism and therefore we argue to keep that view—we really, truly, have considered all the evidence and all the arguments, and we reject it on those grounds.
Has it got to the point where replying to this would be a violation of the ‘Do not feed the trolls’ convention? I had written a brief response but realize it may be better to ignore instead. But I will defer to the judgement of others here… if there are people who are still taking mwaser seriously then I will engage as appropriate.
Has it got to the point where replying to this would be a violation of the ‘Do not feed the trolls’ convention?
mwaser does not sound trollish here to me:
This community is far worse at that than most I’ve seen. Y’all know how to argue/debate “logically” much better—but it’s normally to the purpose of retaining your views, not discovering where you might have gone wrong or where you might do better.
There are users whom I think this describes well, including a few very active and usually-correct ones.
Good point. An important distinction. Trolling is entirely different in nature (and much more normatively objectionable). Although one way to create trolls is to feed the crackpots after midnight.
Yes, reducing the total amount of replies is a feature. Reducing the amount of good replies (and/or the diversity of replies) is a bug. Making it easy to make a mistake is a major bug. Too many people don’t bother to understand a post before they upvote or downvote it—they go with their initial prejudices. To form a coherent reply requires reading and understanding a post—assuming, of course, it is a post with substance (which is why I “complain” about substanceless posts).
Look at my most recent post here. It’s down to −5 and has exactly one pretty useless comment. I have gotten some really good criticism. I’ve also had posts where the only comments are endless repetitions of “he is obviously making this assumption”—regardless of how many times I say, “No, I don’t believe that. I am deriving my point from this other direction.” (Though, I must also admit that some of my original replies were not that clear, courteous, or cool-headed ;-)
It seems as though you don’t like karma systems. But surely they do much more good than bad. Poor karma has precious few consequences around here. Maybe there should be more—like throttling comments.
Lest people think that I’m mellowing out, I will continue to argue that upvotes are unwise (shortsightedly “rationally” fulfilling one goal while overlooking a number of the voter’s own goals—not to mention being rather unsocial/discouraging particularly when perceived as piling onto mindless/substanceless arguments).
Well-written and cordial posts arguing against the site’s preferred positions are being summarily downvoted to invisibility.
I haven’t seen any recent examples of this recently (since the last times cryonics evangelism was considered, of course.) I suspect that instead you do not recognise the kinds of error in reasoning that have been detected and responded to.
I was just thinking how there’s a weird hivemind thing going on with the downvotes. Well-written and cordial posts arguing against the site’s preferred positions are being summarily downvoted to invisibility.
This doesn’t look like a very healthy discussion dynamic.
I have been using the Kibitzer since I started posting, and my handle on this matter is that well-written, cordial posts that don’t use LW techniques are downvoted. That is, they argue against the preferred position, and they are downvoted because they argue badly. Small corroborations: the posts that get summarily upvoted are ones that point out lack-of-rationality in the arguments, upvotes on topics when they aren’t flawed.
If that seems like an unhealthy discussion dynamic then you should review the LW techniques for rationality and make a top level post explaining how using these techniques, or how requiring everyone to use these techniques, could result in unhealthy discussions.
Possibility: Well-written, cordial posts are your criteria for upvotes because cordiality and well-writtenness usually correlate with clear thinking and good reasoning. This is true over most of the blog, except for the edge cases. These cases have their roots in subtle cognitive biases, not gross emotional biases, and it’s possible that lack of writing skill and cordiality points out gross emotional biases but not subtler ones.
The kibitzer does nothing to protect people from groupthink.
What exactly do you mean by groupthink? Let’s taboo the word a bit:
All members of group agree (same answer)
All members of group have same/similar thought process (same process to answer)
Answers or processes are flawed (this could just be a common mistake)
Flaws are not corrected because group consensus is more important (this is the bit that distinguishes groupthink from a common mistake, it perpetuates)
Those last two are important parts of groupthink. Without that last one, mathematicians are guilty of groupthink, because they all apply the same (somtimes flawed) processes and get the same answers. Maths isn’t groupthink because attempts are made to discover and fix flaws, and these attempts aren’t ignored out of hand.
The kibitzer blocks out names and karma scores; so you can’t tell what the group consensus is (either by the person’s name; “the community thinks this guy is a troll” or by vote; “-5? this post must be bad”). I follow the same process as everyone else in evaluating a comment, but I don’t know if I’ve gotten the same answer as them. In practice, when I’ve checked, I do get the same answer, so it satisfies the first two conditions. But is the process flawed? And is meeting the group’s consensus more important than fixing these flaws?
I think I feel the problem is more a mismatch between the subtlety of the problem and the bluntness of the tool. Downvotes are a harsh and low-signal way of pointing problems in arguments, and seem more suited to punishing comments which can be identified as crap at a glance. Since this site isn’t doing the free-for-all comedy club thing Slashdot and Reddit have going, I’m not sure that the downvote mechanic quite belongs here to begin with. Users posting downright nonsense and noise don’t even belong on the site, and bad arguments can be ignored or addressed instead of just anonymously downvoting them.
And yes, this probably should go to a toplevel post, but I don’t have the energy for that scale of meta-discussion right now.
Downvoting mechanism is one way of making sure that obvious nonsense-posting gets visibly and quickly discouraged. Without it, there would be more nonsense.
I don’t think that’s actually true. There are very few nonsense posts (or at least, very few that get voted down); and when there are, downvoting doesn’t always discourage the poster. When I see a post with a negative score, it’s more often one that is controversial, or that disagrees with LessWrong dogma, or that was made by someone unpopular here, or that is in the middle of a flamewar between two users, or that is part of a longer conversation where one poster has triggered an “omega wolf” reaction from the rest of the pack by acting conciliatory.
Downvoting wrong comments may be harsh for the person being downvoted, but hopefully in the long run it can encourage better comments, or at least make it easier to find good comments.
There may be some flaws in the karma system or the way it’s used by the community, but I don’t see any obvious improvements, or any other systems that would obviously work better.
Look at mwaser: he complains a lot about being downvoted, but he also got a lot of feedback for what people found lacking in his post. Yes, a portion of the downvotes he gets may be due to factors unrelated to the quality of his arguments (he repeatedly promotes his own blog, and complains about the downvotes being a proof of community irrationality—both can get under people’s skin), which is a bit unfortunate, but not a fatal flaw of the karma system.
I did. The feedback that actually told him something came as replies. I’m not seeing how the use of downvotes actually helped there, and it did seem to add unnecessary nastiness to the exchange.
I agree it’s a bit harsh, and not always useful. It’s a bit of a pity that the karma system doesn’t allow to make a difference between “5 people found this post not-that-great” and “5 people found this post absolutely terrible”.
Maybe it would be nice to have a system that would allow for more nuance, but it would also have to be easy enough to understand and use, and not be easy to game.
Also, I would say that the downvotes did have some utility, by expressing “you should pay more attention to criticism, most people here disagree with you”.
For example, make ‘terrible’ votes cost karma.
What about the ability to mark a comment as obsolete if you changed your mind? It will then be under the fold but people won’t be able to downvote it anymore. Or should people who changed their mind be punished infinitely? I noticed that I often delete comments that get downvoted if I changed my mind, e.g. understood where I was wrong, because they keep getting downvoted long after the discussion ended. By deleting it I destroy the context and consistency of the discussion. But I also do not want to be downvoted anymore for something I don’t believe and I want to signal that I changed my mind.
If you change your mind, just edit the comment to say so.
Preferably by adding that statement, without changing the original comment, so that existing discussion doesn’t break.
People here tend to reward humility vigorously. (Humility including the strong non-submissive kind that doesn’t base the ego on attachment to being right, not just signals of lower status.)
As Richard suggests editing your comment, leaving the original while adding a retraction is a good idea (and somewhat of a convention). You can make it bold by using two asterices on both sides.
It is also worth adding a reply later on in the discussion explaining your new position and why you changed it. Unless I confuse you with someone else (quite possible) I think I recall you once before changing your mind and acknowleding it publicly. By reading that I gained a lot of respect for your judgement (or that of whoever else it was if I mistake your identity).
Not a bad idea; having all votes public may also be an improvement.
Still, I suspect that whatever the system, there would be someone to argue that it sucks, which isnt’t an excuse to not improve it, but a reason to be cautious.
The purpose of implementing voting, as opposed to (for example) soliciting critical/praising comments, is to get more information about people’s attitude towards individual comments, by lifting reasons not to signal (and thus lock the community focus better, protecting it from watering down). Commenting would be less frequent because (1) it’s more difficult to comment; (2) if you have little to say, or what you’d say has already been said, you don’t want to create more noise.
Requiring that votes are made public will discourage some of the voters from signaling their attitude, or otherwise distort the signal for image purposes. I’m not even sure whether voluntary public voting is a good idea, because of the image-driven distortion effect, but since it’s presumably no worse than with commenting, it might not be that bad.
I will oppose that option for as long as I have breath. If it is implemented then I recommend to all participants that they find a way to game that system so as to minimize the damage.
(I’ll not repeat the reasons here but I have mentioned them previously.)
Metafilter has a pretty simple system. Users can favorite posts and comments. The favorite count and the names of the favoriters are public. There are no corresponding unfavorites. Instead, the users may silently flag the post, indicating that it seems to be bad enough that a moderator should probably take a look. The moderators clean up crap comments manually, guided by the flags.
I haven’t read the above thread. But here’s an idea I had about the Karma system: If you want to downvote someone you’re asked to provide a reply explaining why you downvoted the comment. If you downvote 5 times without explaining yourself you’ll lose 1 Karma point.
It always really bothers me if I get downvoted without getting feedback because without feedback I’m unable to improve, refine my writing skills or rationality. What’s the point then? Merely losing Karma score will led people to conclude (unjustified) that they are downvoted for various reasons but not that they may be wrong or that their comment simply does not add anything valuable to the debate. Negative Karma without feedback causes resentment in all people except those who already acquired enough rationality skills and realization to infer that there might be something wrong with their comment and not with the person downvoting it. The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers and make them conclude that LW is merely an echo-chamber and does not tolerate their precious critique.
I felt the same way when I first started posting here. Particularly when I was challenging the local conventional wisdom. But now I realize that anonymous unexplained downvotes are a form of feedback, and a particularly valuable form of feedback to someone prepared to take advantage of it.
Because feedback in the form of comments simply provokes an automatic verbal response from you. You learn nothing from the experience. You just get some practice at constructing rationalizations. But feedback in the form of anonymous downvotes forces you to stop and reflect: Just what does this mean? What do I need to change so as to prevent this? What experiments should I undertake?”
ETA:
A good point. So for LW regulars, it may be worth remembering that it is more informative to upvote explicit criticism of newbie mistakes than to downvote the mistakes themselves.
A good suggestion. I expect whether I follow it or not will depend on how arrogant the newbie is. Unless, of course the explicit criticism is ‘you are being arrogant and annoying. We are more fussy about that sort of thing here than in many other places on the internet’. Then I suppose the same principle would apply. :)
But if you were posting a comment about cooking wouldn’t you weigh the Karma of a chef differently than that of someone who has merely joint your culinary community to read up on some recipe?
I don’t expect most of all people to conclude this naturally. I believe there is some evidence for this, as for example this Wiki entry states:
And that is actually from a ‘Rationality Wiki’, so what might John Doe conclude?
I loved that line. It was put in there among ‘the ugly’ but I consider it one of the best features of lesswrong. Just because they talk about some guy in high school doesn’t mean their thinking is any good! Eat downvote burn until your thinking gets up to scratch Descartes. Read the damn sequences!
(I wonder if Descartes would end up getting into arguments with Mitchell… “I thought I was me, I still think I’m me, therefore I am still me!”)
My experience with comments has been that it is wisest to ignore the reputation of the source and simply focus on the words. (One exception: interpreting irony).
So I doubt that knowing the source of up- and down- votes would be particularly useful either. If I know that a great chef has downvoted my chili recipe, I still don’t know whether it is because he doesn’t like my spelling, doesn’t like my ingredients, or simply doesn’t care for chili.
If a chef downvotes your chili recipe, it could be because he doesn’t like your spelling, your ingredients, or chili.
If a random person downvotes your chili recipe, it could also be because she doesn’t like your spelling, your ingredients, or chili.
The first downvote is still more informative even given any particular reason for downvoting, because the chef is more likely than a random person to know how to spell “roux”, cook a perfect pot of pinto beans, or have good reasons to dislike chili as a class of food (e.g. “tried seven versions, don’t like any” v. “had it when I was a kid and didn’t like it”).
I personally believe I am usually better off not knowing who downvoted me. Quite often (although not always) when people downvote my comments I hold their judgement in contempt. This includes those comments that receive initial downvotes but rebound to become significantly positive once the better (and less impassioned) judgement of the broader community sets in.
If the comments justifying their downvote disgust me then I just end up losing respect for the individual. Since it isn’t all that much of a benefit to me to know who has objectionable judgement in such matters and it is far more pleasant to converse with people I respect I prefer to not know.
(Oh, and if I had to comment every time I downvoted things would get downright spammy!)
This is a very good point. I upvoted your comment for this point even though I don’t believe your suggestion would work well as a general practice. I agree that there are times when explanations are beneficial and in the case of new users this is definitely something to remember.
Example—while I was writing this my previous comment went to −1. This is not a big deal at all and nor is it particularly surprising. But all the same I am glad I don’t know who the culprit was (‘culprit’ framing intended to convey perspective) and have no difficulty at all in inferring either what their actual motivations likely are or what reasons they would actually express.
The mere fact of a downvote is of some use to me in as much as it informs me that it is a topic on which it will be beneficial to me to replace personal sincerity with political optimisation. ie. Use the kind of language that makes critics look bad for criticizing (instead of casually leaving a wide open target). Present whatever statements are most likely to achieve a desired outcome rather than just saying what I believe.
I don’t think anyone would benefit if someone went and justified their voting decision and I would be surprised if I found it much more informative than the integer representation.
EDIT: While I was writing this comment the ‘-1’ in question changed to ‘+2’. That did surprise me!
I’m aware that you do not support making votes public, so forcing people to comment is something you don’t support either. I haven’t read up on your reasons yet. But consider that as any community grows more popular the number of people that do not indentify with its motto will grow too. This might ultimately result in a reputation system that does not reflect the base and therefore the intended standards of the community, in this case the refinement of rationality. More so if the number of people previously equipped with the sufficient skills required in any given community is very low. And for those reasons I believe that making votes public gives people a chance to spot unreasonable votes based on differing matters of taste or bias.
Any resentment is better directed at certain individuals, as you are able to inquire about their reasons, than the community as a whole, as people will rather just leave.
The biggest downside I see to public voting would be the emergence of a pattern of reciprocity—both “you downvoted my post, so I’ll downvote yours” and “you upvoted my post, so I’ll upvote yours”.
I don’t think so -- 10 downvotes from one single individual is much harder to forget than 10 downvotes from the community in general. 100 downvotes from the community in general might make you want to leave, but 100 downvotes from a single guy might have the same effect too (and you’ll start hating him way before that).
I suppose it does at that. Although I note that I wouldn’t like explanations to be forced even if comments are public. The main reason is that it makes things more personal and emphasizes disagreement. I also anticipate that I will quite often not believe the explanation! People’s justifications for their opinions and particularly their social judgments are generated by a different mechanism to what gives them that opinion. The question “is that their excuse or their real reason?” will always apply and quite often warrant the answer ‘excuse’.
What do you suggest I do to discourage this? ;)
(I note that it is also likely true that the number of people who agree with me may increase too, particularly if it is a position I expect people to appreciate more as they gain a more sophisticated grasp of lesswrong social dynamics.)
Errr.… that seems to suggest that-which-is-lesswrong has already been lost!
Err… that isn’t ‘for those reasons’ so much as it is an independent point. But it is a good point and something that would be the most prominent advantage to sacrificing anonymity. For related reasons some forums make the karma impact of votes dependent on the karma of the voter (stepped approximately logarithmically proportional).
A possible alternative is to have only manually approved voters (like moderators, but more numerous), with other things staying the same. Requiring commenting is not a good option.
Slightly OT, but it might be wise to have some sort of automatic limit on voting too often just after acquiring an account here. If LW should happen to attract the negative attention of Pharyngula, or the chan hordes, or the Conservapedia crowd, or yaoi fangirls, or tea partiers, or some other populous constituency, they could vote each other up in karma and then be pretty disruptive.
I suspect I’m not the only one who would be instinctively averse to that. :)
That’s mostly a community reanimation measure. If quality of voting merely starts to deteriorate, a moderate karma cutoff that enables voting might do the trick.
That would be worth a shot at least.
I’d like to see total upvotes and downvotes, not just the sum.
I thought for a minute that votes made using the kibitzer could count for more. But this would be a feature that would favor dishonest users (who could game it) over honest users.
A notion for a slightly more informative karma system. Each person can apply 1, 2, or 3 karma points (plus or minus).
Instead of just giving the number of points, the slot after the date has total points, number of plus points, number of minus points, and number of voters.
I realize there’s a little redundancy, but I think that would be alright to make it more convenient for anyone who doesn’t want to be constantly doing routine arithmetic.
The idea would probably be a little graph showing point accumulation over time, but that seems like too much added work for the site.
I’ve never made the claim that the downvotes are “proof” of community irrationality. In fact, given what I believe to be the community’s goals, I see them as entirely rational.
I have claimed that certain upvotes are irrational (i.e. those without any substance). The consensus reply seems to be that they still fulfill a purpose/goal for a large percentage of the regulars here. By definition, that makes those upvotes rational (yes, I AM reversing my stand on that issue because I have been “educated” on what the community’s goals apparently are)..
I am very appreciative of the replies that have substance. I am currently of the opinion, however, that the karma system actually reduces the amount of replies since it allows someone to be easily and anonymously dismissed without good arguments/cause.
By curiosity, what do you consider to be the community’s goals?
1) In itself, reducing the amount of replies is a feature, not a bug; I expect most readers would prefer few comments of high quality than many comments of varying quality.
2) the only instances of ’someone being dismissed without good arguments/cause” have been obvious spam and cranks. I don’t think it’s a fair description of the reaction to your comments, however; you’ve had plenty of detailed criticism.
The stated goal of the community is to refine the art of human rationality. Unfortunately, rationality is an instrumental goal dependent upon the next-level-up or terminal goal. Most people, including me (initially, at least), assume that the next goal up is logical argumentation or discovery of how to reason better.
Most of the practices here are rational in terms of a specific individual’s goals (mostly in terms of maintaining beliefs) but are strictly contrary to good argumentation techniques. The number of ridiculous strawmen, arguments by authority, arguments by pointing to something long and rambling that has nothing to do with the initial argument, etc. is nothing short of overwhelming.
So the next goal up clearly isn’t rational argumentation. Assuming that it was was the mistake that I made in the post Irrational Upvotes (and why I subsequently retracted my stand that they were irrational). They are rational in relation to another goal. My error was in my assumption of the goal.
One of Eliezer’s main points is learning how to learn where you go wrong. This community is far worse at that than most I’ve seen. Y’all know how to argue/debate “logically” much better—but it’s normally to the purpose of retaining your views, not discovering where you might have gone wrong or where you might do better.
(I’ll cover 1 and 2 in subsequent comments—thanks for a high-quality response)
Some things to consider on these points (mostly because I have not noticed a prevalence of these issues)
Strawmen. If, at point X, Y looks like a strawman of a position, then at point Y, X will look like a strawman. I think. If that’s the case, it could be that many of us are at point X (LW rationality techniques, etc) and you are at point Y—making valid, credible arguments that we are countering with strawmen, as it were.
Arguments by authority. A hallmark of LessWrong is linking back to the sequences or to other posts; this could very easily look like we are saying “Eliezer said that’s not the case”. We aren’t; he just produced a very good explanation of why it isn’t the case, and it’s easier to link to that explanation rather than fumble through our own duplication. Another point is that the average LWer is far more capable of deferring to people they know to be often correct—their judgement as a Bayesian reasoner is itself evidence. This looks even more like argument from authority, but there are subtle differences.
Links to long, rambling segues that aren’t related. They are related, mostly. A combination of decompartmentalised thinking, skill with readily drawing analogies, and skill with (very) long inferential distances can produce relationships that seem bizarre or unlikely.
Lastly, this comment:
is definitely a concern for ALL LWers. I suspect you have stumbled onto a case analogous to theism: it is not the case that we wish to retain our atheism and therefore we argue to keep that view—we really, truly, have considered all the evidence and all the arguments, and we reject it on those grounds.
Has it got to the point where replying to this would be a violation of the ‘Do not feed the trolls’ convention? I had written a brief response but realize it may be better to ignore instead. But I will defer to the judgement of others here… if there are people who are still taking mwaser seriously then I will engage as appropriate.
mwaser does not sound trollish here to me:
There are users whom I think this describes well, including a few very active and usually-correct ones.
Not exactly, but I would support a “Do not feed the crackpots” convention.
Good point. An important distinction. Trolling is entirely different in nature (and much more normatively objectionable). Although one way to create trolls is to feed the crackpots after midnight.
Yes, reducing the total amount of replies is a feature. Reducing the amount of good replies (and/or the diversity of replies) is a bug. Making it easy to make a mistake is a major bug. Too many people don’t bother to understand a post before they upvote or downvote it—they go with their initial prejudices. To form a coherent reply requires reading and understanding a post—assuming, of course, it is a post with substance (which is why I “complain” about substanceless posts).
Look at my most recent post here. It’s down to −5 and has exactly one pretty useless comment. I have gotten some really good criticism. I’ve also had posts where the only comments are endless repetitions of “he is obviously making this assumption”—regardless of how many times I say, “No, I don’t believe that. I am deriving my point from this other direction.” (Though, I must also admit that some of my original replies were not that clear, courteous, or cool-headed ;-)
It seems as though you don’t like karma systems. But surely they do much more good than bad. Poor karma has precious few consequences around here. Maybe there should be more—like throttling comments.
Downvoted, because a comment suggesting “throttling comments” is exactly the kind of comment I would like to throttle. :P
Lest people think that I’m mellowing out, I will continue to argue that upvotes are unwise (shortsightedly “rationally” fulfilling one goal while overlooking a number of the voter’s own goals—not to mention being rather unsocial/discouraging particularly when perceived as piling onto mindless/substanceless arguments).
I haven’t seen any recent examples of this recently (since the last times cryonics evangelism was considered, of course.) I suspect that instead you do not recognise the kinds of error in reasoning that have been detected and responded to.
That would be a systemic problem that deserves its own top level post.