Going to reply to this because I don’t think it should be overlooked. It’s a valid point—people tend to want to filter out information that’s not from the sources they trust. I think these kind of incentive pressures are what led to the “LessWrong Diaspora” being concentrated around specific blogs belonging to people with very positive reputation such as Scott Alexander. And when people want to look at different sources of information they will follow the advice of said people usually. This is how I operate when I’m doing my own reading / research—I start somewhere I consider to be the “safest” and move out from there according to the references given at that spot and perhaps a few more steps outward.
When we use a karma / voting system, we are basically trying to calculate P(this contains useful information | this post has a high number of votes) but no voting system ever offers as much evidence as a specific reference from someone we recognize as trustworthy. The only way to increase the evidence gained from a voting system is to add further complexity to the system by increasing the amount of information contained in a vote, either by weighing the votes or by identifying the person behind the vote. And then from there you can add more to a vote, like a specific comment or a more nuanced judgement. I think the end of that track is basically what we have now, blogs by a specific person linking to other blogs, or social media like Facebook where no user is anonymous and everyone has their information filtered in some way.
Essentially I’m saying we should not ignore the role that optimization pressure has played in producing the systems we already have.
Going to reply to this because I don’t think it should be overlooked. It’s a valid point—people tend to want to filter out information that’s not from the sources they trust. I think these kind of incentive pressures are what led to the “LessWrong Diaspora” being concentrated around specific blogs belonging to people with very positive reputation such as Scott Alexander. And when people want to look at different sources of information they will follow the advice of said people usually. This is how I operate when I’m doing my own reading / research—I start somewhere I consider to be the “safest” and move out from there according to the references given at that spot and perhaps a few more steps outward.
When we use a karma / voting system, we are basically trying to calculate P(this contains useful information | this post has a high number of votes) but no voting system ever offers as much evidence as a specific reference from someone we recognize as trustworthy. The only way to increase the evidence gained from a voting system is to add further complexity to the system by increasing the amount of information contained in a vote, either by weighing the votes or by identifying the person behind the vote. And then from there you can add more to a vote, like a specific comment or a more nuanced judgement. I think the end of that track is basically what we have now, blogs by a specific person linking to other blogs, or social media like Facebook where no user is anonymous and everyone has their information filtered in some way.
Essentially I’m saying we should not ignore the role that optimization pressure has played in producing the systems we already have.